My personal view is that when the Victorian government "captured" the
proposed site for the proposed East Kew Depot, to build Kew High School
(saving only one small corner for the East Kew substation, on High St) the
justification for the extension from Cotham Road collapsed. It doesn't
seem to me to have ever been more than a marginal "good idea" proposal;
unlike the Box Hill extension from Mont Albert (which took 60 years to be
made) it didn't figure in the 1930 tramway extension ideas. (If I'm wrong.
please correct me!)

The Burke Rd/Cotham Rd intersection, where the PMTT laid seldom-used
connecting curves (between Camberwell and Mont Albert) on the SE corner,
had two of the other corners (SW and NW) widened so that possible
connecting curves could be built; the NE corner. But the Cotham Rd
alignment is fairly steep, so an H crossing on Burke Rd would involve a lot
of engineering. The connecting curves were removed when the Whitehorse
Rd/Cotham Rd track was relaid in the late 1950s.

I have never seen even a sketch for a plan for the proposed East Kew depot,
nor for the Burke Rd/High St/Doncaster Rd intersection. I suspect the road
planning (by the then Country Roads Board, where there were some good
engineers who could not see beyond planning for motor vehicles, focussed on
the Eastern Freeway) totally killed any idea that the Victorian
government might look at extending the Burke Rd tramway to anywhere beyond
Cotham Rd.

Extension of the North Balwyn line to Greythorn, and maybe beyond towards
Doncaster, was similarly discarded. A government which sinks millions of
dollars into a freeway isn't likely to consider millions of dollars for a
competitor.

Hal Cain, skeptic that proposals for "public good" will be taken seriously

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 2:13 PM Andrew Cook d3619@...> wrote:

> Interesting. The extension to Ivanhoe? If built, it would have crossed the

> Outer Circle railway north of Cotham Road, at an acute angle. Wonder what

> the safe-working arrangements would have been? Person with a flag or trams

> give way to trains as was the case in Cotham Road.

>

> Cheers,

> Andrew Cook (former typo that is horrified at some of the present-day work

> of so-called 'graphic artists').

>

> Details are at:

>

>

> https://yarratrams.com.au/projects/burke-road-between-camberwell-road-and-cotham-road-camberwell

>

>

> Mal Rowe - noticing that Yarra Trams' graphic artist has included the

> much promised but never delivered tramway in Burke Rd north of Cotham Rd.

>

>

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