March 14, 2010 13:46 by
philip
"Does Melbourne have a tram museum?" asked a visitor to the Immigration Discovery Centre who'd had enough of ships. It does, yes. Two, actually, but both of them were closed, on this particular day, and neither was within walking distance of Flinders Street...
So we stayed in the Discovery Centre and did some research online, exploring Melbourne Museum's cable tram, in detail, then watching a curator describe the model on display in the Melbourne Story exhibition, which has its own virtual tour. Then we reminisced about the flying tram that starred in the opening ceremony to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, in Melbourne, and which was temporarily on display at Melbourne Museum. Further information was gleaned from the Marvellous Melbourne website's section about the development of Melbourne's tram network, which features a brilliant image of a tram-conductor's ticket punch. Then we ran search after search at the Victoria Railways website, enjoying its image gallery of Victorian Railways trams.
Distracted momentarily by an article about bugs on trams, we got serious with the Transport Collection at the History and Technology Collections Online site, where 5787 items were listed and described for our unwavering interest. Somewhere amongst all this we found an eerie image of a tram in Cairo (for all the world like a piece of Melbourne transplanted to Africa) and just sort of stared at it, for a while.
Photo: Sapper Galbraith Source: Museum Victoria
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