"That's really important from a customer service perspective. We do get complaints about service delivery, cancellations, punctuality or skipping stations," she said. Metro said there is no "minimum warning time" for announcing to commuters a train will be changed to express but added the rail operator tried to give as much notice as possible. Metro spokeswoman Larisa Tait said altering a service to run express was only used to assist when recovering from a major disruption, or to avoid a knock-on effect that will ultimately lead to a major delay. "When we alter a service, we ensure that our drivers and station staff are made aware of the changes to make announcements, and aim to express services running in the off-peak direction, impacting only the minority of customers," Ms Tait said. She said a Metro review into the practice of altering services had revealed some services were expressed in the peak direction.

"We concede that on these occasions the wrong decision has been made and we apologise to our customers who have been affected by this," Ms Tait said. "We heavily monitor how often and which services are altered to run express and resort to the practice as infrequently as possible. We understand this approach inconveniences some of our customers, but our aim is to ensure the majority get to their destination on time, while delaying the smallest number of customers possible," Ms Tait said. Transport Minister Terry Mulder denied skipping stations was about trying to improve statistics around performance. "Fatalities, sick customers, police operations, vandalised trains, if something like that happens and you get a train out of sequence, and drivers out of sequence, you can either leave it like that for the rest of the day and disadvantage a whole range of passengers or as quickly as is possible stabilise the timetable," Mr Mulder said. He said the number of trains skipping stations was very low, about .5 per cent of services a week.

If a train service is switched to run express it counts as a "partial cancellation" and contributes to Metro's delivery performance result. In the 12 months to August Metro altered 2421 services to run express out of 738,896 services. Public Transport Users Association president Tony Morton said "we do have a problem with the operation of our train system when we have train stopping patterns being altered on the fly". "Whether it is a perverse consequence of the way we have written the incentives in the contracts with private operators because we have a privatised system or whether we just don't seem to be as good at running trains on time as other cities around the world, for some reason we do seem to have this problem," he said. Labor's public transport spokeswoman, Jill Hennessy, said "Metro punctuality figures have been built off the back of station skipping and timetable manipulation under the Napthine government.

"Victorians should be provided with all timetable information and deserve to be informed upfront if their train will station skip," she said.