The results come just three months after Metro took over the system, having been hand-picked by the government at a cost to taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars in consultants' fees and tendering costs. At the time, Mr Brumby said Metro would deliver ''more train services, greater reliability and punctuality … They will deliver a better transport system for our state''. Yesterday the Premier was less enthusiastic. ''They need to lift their performance,'' he said. ''They have got an agreement with the government and that agreement is set out in writing and I believe they should be meeting it.'' Mr Brumby said Metro had to be given ''a chance to settle in and get on top of the job. But they've had, what, four months now and they are not meeting their performance targets.'' Metro's acting chief executive, Raymond O'Flaherty, said a key reason for the poor performance was a shortage of trains, partly due to continuing braking problems with the fleet of Siemens trains inherited from the previous operator, Connex.

Other reasons cited for the surge in late trains included failed overhead power lines and cancellations causing knock-on effects to other services. The government hired Metro last year in a contract that will pay it $3.8 billion over eight years. It will earn almost that much again from ticket sales, construction contracts and other revenue. And Metro's penalties for late services are capped at $12 million a year - a much less onerous regime than that faced by Connex, which was liable for open-ended penalties for late and cancelled trains. In 2009 Connex paid $25 million back to the government for poor performance. RMIT academic Paul Mees, a critic of the privatised public transport system, said the Premier's reaction to the performance results was an insult to public transport users. ''He designed the system, he stuck with privatisation when it clearly wasn't working, he chose Metro - and he told us that it would fix the problems. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, 'It's the system, stupid'.''

Public sentiment may be shifting against Metro, with an online poll of 1593 Age readers finding that 69 per cent believed Connex had run the train system better. Under Metro's contract it must run 88 per cent of trains within five minutes of their scheduled time to avoid penalties. It failed to do so by a large margin in February, running 83.4 per cent of trains ''on time''. However, it managed to meet its contractual requirement of cancelling fewer than 2 per cent of services. As a result of the excessive number of late services, Metro passengers with monthly, six-monthly or yearly tickets are entitled to two free days of travel as compensation. They can apply at train stations or online. But travellers who use myki will not get the compensation automatically credited to their cards - despite the government having the capacity to have this function put in place.

Mr O'Flaherty said too much equipment on the system had failed since Metro took over from Connex, making the job of running trains to schedule increasingly difficult. ''We need to fix the equipment failures, and fix them for once and for all, and that will lead to an improvement in reliability,'' he said. He said the government, as part of the contract signed last year, had provided extra funding to fix these problems. Mr O'Flaherty was speaking at Malvern station, where problems with trains and tracks were in evidence last weekend. The brakes failed to work on five Siemens trains scheduled to stop there on Saturday and Sunday. Another three Siemens trains had similar problems on Monday, leading to a total of eight six-carriage trains being withdrawn from service indefinitely.

About 45 services were cancelled yesterday, largely as a result of the Siemens trains not being in service. Mr O'Flaherty expected some trains would return to service by tomorrow.