Best Tram Routes to Feature on a Custom Scroll

The route you choose for a custom tram scroll matters more than the size or the typography. The right line carries the story of a city in its destination names; the wrong line reads as generic. This is a working guide to the routes that consistently produce the best-looking, most evocative scrolls — drawn from twenty years of customer orders and our own heritage research. We have included Melbourne’s still-running network, Sydney’s vanished lines, the Adelaide Glenelg corridor, and San Francisco’s F-Market as an international option. None of these picks is the only right answer for its city, but each gives you destinations that read as authentic without needing extra explanation.

Melbourne — 96, 86, 109 and the City Circle 35

Melbourne is the only Australian city to keep its tram network intact, and the visual culture of those lines is still alive in daily use. The 96 from East Brunswick to St Kilda Beach is the route that most often appears on customer scrolls because it crosses the whole spine of the city — Sydney Road, Spring Street, Bourke Street, Spencer Street and the St Kilda Esplanade all on one line. The 86 from RMIT to Bundoora carries the northern suburbs identity and includes the famous Smith Street strip. The 109 from Box Hill to Port Melbourne traces the east-west commercial axis and reaches the bay. The 35 City Circle is the heritage operation — W-class trams in chocolate-and-cream livery, free fare, running clockwise and anti-clockwise around the CBD — and a scroll of its destinations (FLINDERS ST / LA TROBE ST / SPRING ST / WELLINGTON PDE) is one of the most popular pieces we produce. The City Circle is also the route most likely to evoke a specific memory for international visitors who took a free heritage tram on their first day in Melbourne. Our piece on the Melbourne tram network covers the full route list with operational notes, and Yarra Trams publishes the current public timetables and route maps as a useful cross-reference for choosing the right line.

Sydney’s Lost Bondi Route and the Pre-Closure Network

Sydney’s tram network was once the second-largest in the British Empire and closed almost entirely between 1957 and 1961. The Bondi tram is the most famous of the lost routes — the phrase “shoot through like a Bondi tram” entered Australian vernacular precisely because the line was fast, frequent and packed. A scroll featuring the Bondi terminus (BONDI BEACH / BONDI JUNCTION / CHARING CROSS / WAVERLEY) reads as an immediate heritage piece for any Sydneysider over fifty, and as a curiosity for younger buyers who have only ever known it as a bus corridor. Other strong picks from the lost network are the La Perouse line through the eastern suburbs, the Watson’s Bay route through Vaucluse, the North Sydney to The Spit line via Mosman, and the Western Suburbs lines from the old terminus at Circular Quay. Pitt Street and Castlereagh Street appear on many of these as the city-end terminals, which adds visual weight to a scroll. The full closure history with route-by-route detail is in our piece on the lost trams of Sydney. The Sydney Tramway Museum at Loftus preserves several cars from these routes and is the best place to see the original destination blinds in person before deciding which line to commemorate.

Adelaide — The Glenelg Line and the Pre-1958 Network

Adelaide is the unusual case in Australian tram history — a city that closed most of its network in 1958 but kept the Glenelg line running as a single-route survivor, which has since been extended back into the centre as the modern Adelaide Metro tram. A heritage scroll featuring the Glenelg corridor (GLENELG / BRIGHTON / GOODWOOD / VICTORIA SQUARE) is one of the strongest single-route pieces in the Australian catalogue because the line has continuous identity stretching back to 1929 and the destination names have not changed. For older Adelaide customers, the lost routes — Henley Beach, Cheltenham, Mitcham, Parkside and the Norwood line — carry the most sentiment because they closed inside a generation and most adults over seventy travelled them as children. The City of Adelaide street grid means most of these terminate at the four squares (Victoria, Whitmore, Hindmarsh, Hurtle), which gives the scrolls a strong central reference point. We covered the closure and revival in detail in our piece on the Adelaide tram revival, including the routes that have been proposed for restoration but not yet built — those proposed routes are also valid scroll subjects, because the destination signs were prepared before the projects were shelved.

San Francisco’s F-Market — The Heritage Route That Carries the World

If you want an international option that still reads as heritage, San Francisco’s F-Market line is the best single pick. The F-Market runs along Market Street and the Embarcadero from Castro to Fisherman’s Wharf, and it uses restored historic streetcars from cities all over the world — Milan, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Hamburg, Brussels, Lisbon, Moscow and (importantly for Australian customers) a real Melbourne W-class car. The route works as a scroll subject because the destination signage uses authentic period typography, and because the line crosses the most photographed sections of San Francisco — the Castro rainbow flag, the Ferry Building, Pier 39. A scroll featuring the F-Market terminals (CASTRO / MARKET ST / EMBARCADERO / FISHERMAN’S WHARF) carries the same heritage weight as a Melbourne piece but with the added international association. We covered the F-Market in detail in our piece on iconic tram cities of the world, which also gives you Lisbon’s Tram 28 and Hong Kong’s Ding Ding as alternative international subjects. For technical detail on the restored fleet, the Market Street Railway preservation society publishes car-by-car histories.

Why Route Choice Matters More Than Size

The most common ordering mistake we see is choosing the city before choosing the route. A scroll that says MELBOURNE in large letters with no route below is just a city name in heritage typography — visually pleasant but not specific. A scroll that says ROUTE 96 / EAST BRUNSWICK / SYDNEY RD / FLINDERS ST / ST KILDA BEACH is a piece with a story, and the story is what makes the heritage subject hold attention on the wall for years. Customers who choose the route first tend to love their scroll more, even if the resulting piece is smaller and cheaper than a generic city-name version. Route choice also drives the design decisions downstream — the right typography weight, the right destination spacing, whether to include the route number, whether to include a journey direction arrow. We covered the full design logic in the design-your-own guide, and the format reasoning in the size guide. If you do not yet know which route to commemorate, our blog pieces on each city — Brisbane, Hobart and the others — list the historic routes with enough detail to make a confident choice.

One More Australian Option — Hobart and the Cable Network

Hobart deserves a special mention because its system was the first electric tram network in the southern hemisphere and it ran a hybrid cable-and-electric configuration that produced unusual destination signage. A scroll featuring the Hobart cable routes (NEW TOWN / SANDY BAY / MOONAH / NORTH HOBART) reads as a genuinely rare piece because no other Australian city used cable haulage in revenue service the same way. The destinations are short, evocative, and recognisable to any Tasmanian over sixty. Our piece on Hobart’s cable trams gives the full closure history and the route-by-route list. A Hobart scroll is one of the most distinctive pieces in the catalogue precisely because so few people remember the system existed.

Choose Your Route and Start the Scroll

The right route for a scroll is the one you have a personal connection to — the line you grew up riding, the line your parents took to work, the line you found on a holiday in San Francisco or Lisbon. Once you know the route, the rest of the design is straightforward. Start with the design your own tool, or browse pre-built pieces in the main shop if your chosen route is already there. Every scroll is hand-finished in our Noosa and Booragoon studios, printed on heavyweight canvas with brass eyelets and a hardwood top batten, and dispatched with a free digital proof before printing. The shipping page lists current transit times to your address, and Perth-metro customers can collect from Booragoon at no charge.