PROJECT #040: 2047 MELBOURNE FANTASY RAIL

I’ve always been a bit of a gunzel, growing up just past the terminus of the Lilydale Line meant that as a youngster, the train network was my access point to the Greater Melbourne area.  Before the internet gave us easy and immediate access to Melbourne’s train network map, it was found towards the back of the Melway directory - a pre-Google maps necessity for any Melburnian.  After the completion of the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop - more commonly known to most as the underground sections the City Loop and the city’s first subway-style sections of the network - in 1981, the level of change  to the network slowed down, with the Mernda extension and electrification of some of the outer rail corridors the only noteworthy changes.

When the Melbourne Metro 1 project was announced in 2015, it marked a period of excitement for fellow gunzels, not only would we see a change to the network, but a change to the map, which had been static for far too long.  It should be noted that this was before any announcement of an Airport Rail Link or Suburban Rail Loop, but Melbourne Metro 2 had already been flagged as a potential project.

Rail forums lit up with varying visions of how this could look, and trawling through these ideas inspired me to have a go at my vision for the future.  The idea was to set the map in the year 2047 as a realistic representation of the time gaps between  large scale projects announcements.

Stylistically I strayed away from the familiar Melbourne train maps of the 90s-00s and created a ‘New York style’ letter route system for the rail lines. I plotted locations for new stations, and integrated my circa-2047 heavy rail network with a futuristic tram network; it was lots of scrawled notes on paper, and some undeniably nerdy spreadsheets involving network connectivity.  The end result was a mix between the existing 2016 Melbourne rail map and the more famous transit maps of New York and London.  Think of it as a better, more ultimate alternate dimension that exists in my mind, and my desire to bring it to a map.  

I’ve stood at the entrance of a future fictional station and would be able to tell you where the trains at the fictional station would go.

The image below is an example of the spreadsheet I put together to help build the map.

Now that we’ve had a comparable plethora of rail infrastructure announcements that contradict my version of 2047, this will remain a snapshot of a time when people imagined a more connected version of our city. 

As it looks likely to turn out, the 2047 real-world version could be even more exciting than I had ever dared dream, a version that would be used in a map that would eventually end up in The Age, but that’s a different story for a future blog entry.