What's V/Line? That's a good question. They used to be called VicRail, which could have given you the impression that they're a railway company. They are a railway company, of course, but they clearly don't want you to get that impression. They're trying to spread as much confusion as possible:

• What does V/Line mean, anyway? Nothing, of course. That's what makes it such a good name. Doubtless the / in “V/Line” is intended to confuse people who accidentally type it into a URL.

• One of the two main railway stations in Melbourne is Spencer St station. No prizes for guessing where it is; well, not in the old, obsolete days. Now some bright spark has called it “Southern Cross Station”, presumably because it's in the west of Melbourne, and he wouldn't want people to guess where it really is. Doubtless it also helps that there already is a Southern Cross Station in Australia. Doubtless people will get used to the name, so I predict they'll realise that the name Eureka would fit it better. They could always keep the name “Southern Cross” and apply it to Flinders St station, but that has the obvious disadvantage of being in the south of the city and thus not as misleading as it could be.

• How do you get from Melbourne to Adelaide? There's a train line, or there used to be. And on 6 March 2009 I claimed on IRC that it doesn't go through Ballarat, which makes sense when you consider that Ballarat is up in the hills. So we checked V/Line's “Plan your journey” facility. I know the train leaves from Spencer St (all trains to the north and west do), so I entered “Melbourne, Spencer St Station”. But V/Line has so completely expunged the memory of this name that they obviously decided to play a game with me:

   

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  What do any of those names (except for the three in Melbourne) have to do with the name I entered? I can (only barely) understand that they refuse to admit the old name of their biggest station, but what do Sale, Maffra, Kangaroo Flat and Ballarat have to do with the string I entered? Can't their search machine recognize “Melbourne”, where 75% of the state population live? Of course it can. Clearly they're just trying to annoy me.

• So I chose to start my journey at “Melbourne: Flinders Street”, because I don't want to use the name “Southern Cross”. In passing it's interesting to note that they punctuate both names differently. But they wouldn't let me get away with that:

   

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• Surprise, surprise! The rail journey that I recalled was direct, but here you had to change in Geelong, Ballarat and Horsham. And in Horsham they want you to change at Horsham Police Station. Clearly there are no trains there. What's this all about?

  Looking more carefully, I discover that the journey to Geelong is on a “V/Line train”, and the rest of the journey is in a “V/Line coach”. Just one coach out of a train? No, more obfuscation.

  The Oxford English Dictionary clearly has dozens of definitions for “coach”. The most obvious one is 1d, “A railway carriage”. But that's not the one V/Line uses; that would be too simple. Instead, they have found a way to hide the meaning: they use the English word “coach” to mean what Australians call a bus. Of course, I could have been unluckier and gone via Bendigo in a “V/Line Intercity”. Even the OED gives up on that.

• But why go to Ballarat why via train to Geelong and then a bus, when there's a direct rail line to Ballarat? They want you to leave Spencer St at 6:55 and not leave Ballarat until 11:00. Isn't there a faster way to Ballarat?

• Checking the connections between Melbourne and Ballarat gives the same nonsense: if you select just “Melbourne” and “Ballarat”, you're given a you have to specify the name of the correct station.

   

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  But once you guess the correct answers, yes, there's a train leaving at 9:08 and arriving at 10:37. Why didn't they offer that one? Sadly, I can't use this one as an example of obfuscation; it's just program breakage.

• But what about the train to Adelaide? Does it no longer run? Yes, it does, but it's run by the Great Southern Railway, clearly a railway company, and not V/Line. And it doesn't go through Ballarat. V/Line promises to connect to them, and I suspect the main reason is that they don't know how to organize their timetable.

All in all, an excellent obfuscation, worthy of the “state of the art” on the “Internet”. But they have competition in the area of bad timetables: I think all railway companies are working on the principle of maximum annoyance. For unrelated reasons, in the evening we checked how long it takes to get from Newcastle on Tyne to London in England. The first surprise was that British Rail has changed its name too, to the much more ambiguous National Rail. After a bit of searching we were presented with connections that took between 3 and 10 hours. The first to leave was the last to arrive. Of course, maybe there's a difference in fare, but you wouldn't want to see the fares on the same page as the timetable, would you?