As we reveal today, most of the trains that run between Ballarat and Melbourne do get in on time. But a significant proportion of them don't and commuters have a right to feel frustrated.

More than 25 per cent of the trains that ran the Melbourne-Ballarat line in June ran late, the service's worst performance since the State Government upgraded it almost five years ago.

V/Line sets itself an ''effectiveness target'' of 92 per cent, meaning that 92 out of every 100 trains will arrive within five minutes of their scheduled time.

In the past 47 months, V/Line has achieved its own target only five times.

For the other 42 months too many V/Line trains have run late.

In this day and age, a reliable public transport system should not be too much to ask for. Yet for some reason, Victoria struggles to deliver on that, regionally as well as on its metropolitan lines.

Ballarat is one of the largest regional commuter centres in the state. Given the number of people who rely on the service each day to get to and from Melbourne, it is not unreasonable to expect some consistency around scheduling.

When it is running well, the service is a good one. The trains are clean and comfortable and, while we still don't have the 60-minute trip we were promised more than a decade ago, the journey can be preferable to taking a car.

If V/Line could achieve its own efficiency target more regularly, the service - and the commuters - would be all the better for it.

The fact that V/Line has an efficiency target is encouraging. The fact that it fails to meet that target so consistently is not.

We accept that there will occasionally be mitigating circumstances which will force trains to run late. (Forgetting to refuel, as happened recently, is probably not one of those acceptable circumstances.)

But for the most part, we see no reason why having 92 per cent of its trains arrive on time should be such a difficult thing to achieve.