All posts tagged: Melbourne

Historical Maps: Australian Interstate Passenger Rail Schematics, November 1983

June 21, 2016
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Here’s a couple of neat timetable/route diagrams for Interstate passenger rail services in Australia back in 1983. The first shows westbound services from Sydney, the other shows the corresponding return journeys. Differing rail gauges and immense distances have always made interstate rail travel a difficult prospect in Australia, hence the paucity of services even 30-odd years ago (only three Sydney-Melbourne trains a day and just one daily Sydney-Brisbane service). Source: Image 1 and Image 2 […]

Before and After: Regional Rail and Coach Network, Victoria, Australia

November 14, 2015
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It’s always fun to do a “before and after” comparison, and here’s a fantastic example of how a well-drawn diagrammatic map can offer enhanced system legibility over a more geographically-based map. The old map (top), dating from October 2014, is pretty terrible work. Towns and cities are in the right geographical location, but are simply joined by straight lines, which creates a difficult-to-read “spider web” of interconnecting and overlapping routes. Rail lines are shown as both purple […]

Official Map – Melbourne and Regional Victoria Night Network Map, Australia, 2015

October 30, 2015
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Sent my way by Nick Stylianou, here’s a map out of Melbourne, Victoria designed to support a major revamp of weekend night time transit in and around that city. For me, this piece continues a worrying recent trend of night service maps that have poor contrast and legibility, simply for the sake of pushing a dark “night” colour theme. This one even has freakin’ stars in the background, which is starting to verge on the ridiculous.  […]

Submission – Historical Map: Melbourne Tramways of WWI

May 8, 2015
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Hi Cam, Adam from the Melbourne Tram Museum here. Would love to get your thoughts on this! This is my first map done from scratch. We’ve recently launched our special exhibition named Tramway Anzacs, which tells the story of the 538 tramway employees who volunteered for military service in World War 1. As well as sharing their fascinating stories (including a guy who went from being a Cable Tram Gripman at Port Melbourne depot to fighting alongside Lawrence of […]

Historical Map: General Railway Development to 1985, Melbourne, Australia (1969)

March 5, 2015
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Submitted by John Mullany via email. Here’s an interesting rail planning map from 1969, presumably produced in association with the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan. It outlines all the improvements planned for Melbourne’s metropolitan rail system, including a whole bunch of new branches as shown in blue. According to the map, the works depicted were to be completed by 1985. Fast forward to 2015 – some 30 years past that deadline – and only the City […]

Melbourne Trams and Toronto Streetcars to the same scale as US Streetcar Systems

January 14, 2015
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My final post on this subject (for now). I absolutely love these two separate graphics that take a previous version of Matt Johnson’s graphic (which only compared streetcar systems in the US) and add either Melbourne’s comprehensive tram network or Toronto’s streetcar network at the same scale. To be honest, I almost didn’t believe the Melbourne one when I first saw it – surely the creator had muddled up miles and kilometres! – and had to […]

Historical Map: Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board – Proposals for General Scheme, 1923

June 15, 2014
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Another great planning map from almost 100 years ago. Melbourne, of course, is one city that has retained its trams over the years, rather than tearing them all out, only to eventually replace them with light rail or new trams in the modern day. trammuseum: Here’s a great map that we’ve just added to our archives today. Authored by the M&MTB’s Chief Engineer T.P. Strickland in 1923 and overlaid on a Sands & McDougall map of Metropolitan […]

Unofficial Future Map: Melbourne Metro Train Network by Bernie Ng

May 26, 2014
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Submitted by Bernie, whose excellent map of Singapore (Nov. 2013, 3.5 stars) has already been featured on this site. Bernie says: Hi Cameron, I saw your post about the new Victorian Rail Network concept map (April 2014, 3.5 stars) by PTV and was very impressed – it’s quite a quantum leap forward from the existing map.  I thought I’d have a go at further redefining the map, but for the Melbourne Metro network only. (I […]

Historical Map: Train and Tram Travel Times in Melbourne, Australia, c. 1920

May 5, 2014
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A handsome isochrone map produced by Melbourne’s Metropolitan Town Planning Commission to show the “minimum” (i.e., absolute best scenario) travel time into the city via suburban railways and tram lines. Some later additions to the network seem to have been pencilled in at the bottom right of the map. Side note: Wikipedia’s article on isochrone maps includes the incredibly lazy assertion that “isochrone maps have been used in transportation planning since 1972 or earlier”, simply because […]

Victorian Rail Network – Concept Map, April 2014

April 15, 2014
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Here’s an interesting proposed new map out of Australia which combines Melbourne’s suburban rail network with the V/Line passenger rail service. In a way, this makes sense, as many of V/Line’s services act as commuter rail services from surrounding cities like Geelong. With the introduction of the myki farecard, much of the V/Line network now even shares the same ticketing system, as shown on the map by use of a solid grey route line. However, it […]