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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...

Back in 1923, about 60 years before I was even a “planning proposal”, someone had the idea of creating a more connected version of the tram network in Melbourne.  While Melbourne is the proud location of the largest tram network in the world, had this vision been realised, it would have been undisputedly at the top not just for size, but also connectivity.  You may think that Melbourne’s tram network covers a large part of the city, and whilst coverage across the inner city is largely good, it’s mainly a radial network beyond the Hoddle Grid, with buses often filling...

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...