PROJECT #070: FANTASY VICTORIAN RAIL NETWORK MAP
As the previous blog post can attest, I have a keen appreciation for the beauty and variety of regional Victoria. It probably comes as no surprise then, that I’ve always wanted to create a fantasy V/Line map - V/Line being the brand of Victoria’s regional rail network. Afterall, why keep all the fantasy rail map magic to metropolitan Melbourne’s trains and trams?
Victoria is geographically small by Australian standards, but fairly large by global standards, being approximately the size of the United Kingdom, so where to start with my vision for a rail network that covers an area equal to one of the world’s great pioneering rail nations? Fortunately, a great series of maps exist on the VR Maps website which shows a geographically accurate representation of the Victorian rail network throughout the decades. For Victoria, rail infrastructure peaked around the 1930’s-1940’s, so I used that as the seed for the germination of my ideas. Similar to many other places in the world, when private transport - cars - grew in popularity, rail infrastructure became neglected. My vision imagines a version of Victoria where the rail infrastructure continued to be prioritised over road. A lot of lines closed to passenger services in the 60’s-80’s, so these were included in my map, and I added in all towns with a population of over 200 or so, similar to the population of Talbot, (which was added back into the network a few years back).
The idea of a Victoria-wide train network appeals to me on a deeply personal level, as I grew up in ‘the sticks’ (far from the inner city for those who don’t speak Australian), but now work in the city. Someday I would love to be able to commute from the country for work. So looking at this map definitely gets the imagination going as to how many options to call ‘home’ would open up for me if the V/Line network was bigger and better.
Given the seemingly endless debate about high-speed rail locally, I’ve incorporated that into the map, taking inspiration from the Spanish Rail Network (AVE), where major cities are connected by trains that travel up to 350km/h. If Victoria featured similar infrastructure, this would mean a trip from Melbourne to Bendigo would be reduced to around 1 hour from the current schedule which is closer to 2. How would that impact the state’s population distribution and would we see de-centralisation? This also applies to those towns with 300 or so people, the network is designed so that smaller rail lines feed into the larger trunk lines into major regional centres. How would this impact a population corridor from say Ballarat-Skipton, or the towns along the McIvor Highway?
Filling in the gaps for cities and towns not connected to a rail service such as Lakes Entrance, and Mt Beauty, I’ve also included some select coach services and numbered them in a way similar to the numbering system for the train services. I’ve also included some coach services to some of the more popular tourist destinations.
Speaking of, another aspect mentioned on this map is train travel as tourism. On a trip down to Hakone in Japan, I noticed a ‘Romance Car’, a train service running direct services to tourist towns, and offering a first class experience with food and drink included. In my fantasy world, would that work in Victoria? A long weekend trip to Daylesford or Maldon, direct trains to the Grampians, Walhalla or Bright? Special event trains to La Dolce Vita in Whitfield? I say, sign me up!
The map can be found here:
https://admaps.myshopify.com/collections/futuristic-transit-maps/products/fantasy-victoria-regional-rail-map