Melbourne’s Iconic Tram Network — From W-Class to E-Class

Other Australian capitals dismantled their trams in the 1950s and 1960s. Melbourne dug in, fought the bus lobby, and kept the rails. The decision looks better with every passing year. Today the city operates the largest urban tram network on the planet — 250 kilometres of double track, 24 routes, around 500 trams and roughly 200 million passenger journeys a year. The wooden-bodied W-class still trundles around the City Circle while the latest E-class glides down Route 96 to St Kilda. This is how Melbourne kept its trams when nobody else did.

The City That Refused to Let Go

Melbourne’s first horse trams ran in 1884, and cable trams arrived a year later courtesy of the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company. By 1891 the cable network stretched 75 kilometres, the third largest in the world after Chicago and San Francisco. Electrification began in 1906 and was largely complete by the 1930s, with the iconic green-and-cream W-class first rolling off the Preston Workshops production line in 1923.

When most cities tore up their tracks after the Second World War, Melbourne’s Tramways Board chairman Robert Risson dug in. Risson, a former army major, simply refused to follow the international trend. He concreted the tracks into the road so they could not be lifted cheaply, kept ordering new W-class cars, and rebuffed every proposal to convert routes to buses. By the time the political winds shifted in the late 1960s, removal had become too expensive. Melbourne’s trams survived almost by accident — saved by one stubborn engineer.

The W-Class: A National Symbol

If any single tram defines Australia it is the Melbourne W-class. Built between 1923 and 1956 at the Preston Workshops, the wooden-bodied W2, W5, W6 and W7 cars became as familiar a sight in Melbourne as the cable cars in San Francisco. More than 750 were built, and they served continuously for over 80 years on routes like the famous Route 8 along St Kilda Road.

Today, a small fleet of restored W-class trams still operates the free City Circle service, painted in the burgundy and gold of the City Circle livery. They are heritage-listed and treated by Melburnians with genuine affection. Their distinctive destination scrolls — Glenhuntly, Camberwell, East Brighton, Port Melbourne, St Kilda Beach — became cultural icons in their own right. The same hand-lettered typography is reproduced on every heritage scroll we print, and routes like Sandringham and Melbourne Centred remain among our most popular Victorian designs.

Iconic Routes — 96, 86 and 109

Some Melbourne tram routes have transcended public transport to become cultural shorthand. Route 96 from East Brunswick to St Kilda Beach passes more bars, bookshops and beaches per kilometre than almost any other tram line in the world. It runs through Brunswick Street, Bourke Street Mall, Spencer Street and Albert Park, and is now operated entirely by low-floor E-class trams.

Route 86 from Bundoora to Waterfront City is the longest in the network at over 22 kilometres. Route 109 from Box Hill to Port Melbourne runs through the Docklands and connects three major hospitals. Route 35 — the free City Circle loop — is the one tourists ride first, often on a restored W-class. Each route has its own scroll, its own destination list, and its own following. The European scroll gallery on this site shows how Melbourne’s destination boards sit alongside their Continental counterparts — same typography, same craft.

The E-Class Modernisation

Since 2013, Melbourne’s modernisation programme has put 100 E-class trams into service. Built in Dandenong by Bombardier (now Alstom), they are 33 metres long, fully air-conditioned, low-floor and accessible. They run on Route 96, 11 and 86 — the network’s busiest corridors — and represent the largest single fleet order in Australian tram history.

The E-class doesn’t replace the W-class so much as complete the network. Older Z-class and B-class trams handle middle routes; the W-class runs the City Circle; the E-class moves the volume traffic. The result is a system that carries more passengers each year than any tram network in Europe and ranks alongside the largest in the world. Yarra Trams publishes detailed route information for visitors, and Wikipedia maintains a thorough overview of the Melbourne network.

Why Melbourne Trams Belong on the Wall

A Melbourne destination scroll captures something most cities can only wish for: a living, working tram network that has not changed its visual language in a century. The white-on-black destination boards in a W-class tram are essentially the same boards that hung in the cab of a 1923 wooden car. The typography, the spacing, the abbreviations — all preserved. That continuity is rare in Australian design and makes Melbourne scrolls especially collectable.

We print every Melbourne route from the surviving network and many of the closed lines too — Glen Iris, Hartwell, the old Bourke Street tramway. If you grew up catching the 8 down St Kilda Road or the 16 to Kew, there’s a fair chance we have your route in the gallery. Where we don’t, the design-your-own page lets you spec a scroll to match an exact childhood memory. For sister stories on this blog, see Sydney’s lost trams and Adelaide’s revival.

Bring a piece of Melbourne’s working tram network home. Browse the Victorian scrolls in our shop, see exact sizes and prices for canvas and fabric formats, or check our FAQs for shipping, materials and turnaround. Whether it’s the route you commute every day or the line your grandparents rode to the beach, the scroll on your wall is a small piece of the network that refused to die.