A WALK DOWN ROUTE ELEVEN: THE WISDOM OF TRAM DRIVERS

On a journey from West Preston to the Docklands, we discover the spiritual importance of Melbourne’s trams and the people who animate them

Words by Charlie Gill

Illustrations by Marnie Florence

This feature was originally published in The Rotunda's September 2025 edition. The pdf is accessible via our home page.

---

The winter sky above the Caltex Reservoir service station is a vast patchwork of blue and grey yawning north towards some distant frontier. I have no intention of reaching it. The universe, as far as The Rotunda is concerned, ends at the intersection of Union Street and Gilbert Road in West Preston. Here lies the aforementioned servo, a Chinese restaurant with excellent dim sims, the abandoned husk of a bar called ‘The End of the Line’, and the end of the line itself: Stop 47, the Route 11’s final destination.

From here, I planned to walk the length of the Route 11 from West Preston to the Docklands. It was an attempt at synthesising my recent research into Melbourne’s trams and their drivers. I’d interviewed a charismatic driver on the condition of anonymity, contacted the godfathers of the online tram-enthusiast community, met perhaps the oldest person on Yarra Tram’s payroll and monitored my friend’s intimate relationship with a young driver. But it wasn’t enough. I felt compelled to make some kind of blood sacrifice in honour of the route that raised me, so I was joined at the end of the line by two of my friends, Abbie and Phoebe, and we began our journey south.

Courtney Barnett wrote a song about how dreary Preston is, but she must’ve missed the lovely moments when drivers greet each other as lonely suburban trams rub shoulders. As we set off, I explained to my companions what I’d learnt from the deep-thinking driver I interviewed over coffee last year. We’ll call him Ari. Over his six years in the job, Ari has developed a range of unique waves that function like secret handshakes. From their respective cockpits, he and one of his colleagues charge like jousting knights and play a rapid game of rock paper scissors, sounding the gong to announce the winner and keeping score back at the depot. That’s just one wave-variant.

“You might be having a really hard day, and someone comes along with something hilarious for you,” he told me. “Everyone knows what you’re going through, and unless you’re another tram driver, you can’t understand what it is. I probably have forty people I have different waves to."

Apparently the physical experience is like a kid’s amusement ride, but the job requires the kind of resilience only life can teach you. One day, a man woke from a nap and banged on Ari’s screen door.

“He was saying, ‘I’m going to fucking kill you, I know where you live, you’re a tip rat.’”

Police sirens happened to be ringing out nearby and the man fled, but Ari took three days off to settle his nerves. Then there’s just unkindness.

“One of the worst days is the Melbourne Cup. You take them in, and they’re all well dressed and everything, and you bring them back, and they’re fucking diabolical, horrible people.”

Going through a well-to-do area, a woman asked him about nearby road works. Ari told her he didn’t know because he wasn’t from around there. “And she goes: ‘Well, of course you don’t live around here, you’re just a tram driver!’”

Then I had one lady who banged on the door and asked ‘Why is this tram so full?’ I looked at her and said: ‘I’m going to contemplate that.’ I think about it most days. It’s a really deep, almost metaphysical question of life. I don’t have an answer.”

But Ari didn’t seem bitter about how intense the job can be.

“It’s all part of it, like life. You don’t understand love until you’ve been heartbroken. You don’t understand joy until you’ve been depressed. It’s always going to change every minute. We’re literally making 100 decisions a minute: What’s this car doing? Who’s getting off? What’s up ahead? Just constantly aware of what’s around you.”

As the girls and I rounded Gilbert Road, past the Route 11’s bedroom at the New Preston Depot (right beside the famous Koori Mural), I spoke enviously about Ari and his spiritual approach to driving. That stretch of St Georges Road has the purgatory ambience of a Dali painting, but none of the drama; I felt drenched in a bleakness that my agnostic childhood had left me ill-equipped to handle. Still, as we walked past the Thornbury Church of Christ and other spaced-out churches (in both disposition and distance from each other), it was clear they couldn’t comfort me either. Life was meaningless. Our journey seemed like nothing more than an attention-seeking fare evasion.

Ari’s philosophy, though, extolled the virtue of appreciating whatever it is that happens to surround you. Those anonymous buildings had always belonged less to the material world than some grey peripheral universe, but they still deserved respect, and in the near distance—foregrounded by palm trees swinging in the breeze like cheap set design—was the St Georges Motor Inn. We entered. It was a little drab, but seemed like a well-run establishment, and we took note of the room prices in preparation for becoming adulterous in middle-age.

Just down the road was an impressive toy model store called Lobos Collectables: a lot more colourful but far less sexually-charged. Huge glass cases housed a thousand bite-sized militias, including a little nativity scene of the Irwin family kidnapping a crocodile. They seemed like the first people aside from Phoebe and Abbie I’d seen in a long time. Everybody else was on a tram, softly roaring into the horizon in the direction of Danny’s Burgers. We pushed southwards.

Just a week earlier, passing Danny’s Burgers on the 11 and remembering my friend’s observation that its narrow interior looks like a film set only supposed to be seen from one angle (north-south), I met a man we’ll call Brian: a diminutive old fella wearing a tattered Harley Davidson cap, an orange Yarra Trams fleece and paint-splattered work pants. He was an 84-year-old tram painter returning from his shift at the New Preston Depot (previously known as the Preston Workshops), where he’d worked for 40 years.

Brian explained that trams get painted because “all sorts of things hit ‘em”, like cars and buses, which often happens to the 33 metre E-class models the 11 has used since 2015. He reckons they’re too long. His favourites are the old W-classes used for the city circle.

Brian was born in Fitzroy, on the corner of Gore Street and Charles Street, in 1940. He thinks Australia isn’t the country it once was (the most printable example being that trams are getting wrapped up in advertising more) and maintained that he doesn’t feel connected to trams themselves. But he knows people at the depot who do, and he seemed connected to them: this will be his last year before retirement, though apparently he said that twelve months ago.

“I suppose I’ll miss it,” he said. “I suppose once you stop there mightn’t be much time left to go. But the people there, they’re good people.”

As Abbie, Phoebe and I walked through North Fitzroy and up Brunswick Street, past its shining postboxes, shopfronts tagged by teenagers and the big sunflower atop the florist, I thought about Brian. We stopped at a Gertrude Street restaurant for a drink, not too far from his birthplace.

---

The old North Fitzroy tram depot is just down the road from the Railway Hotel. Last year, its W-class trams were removed and sent to storage. On a YouTube video posted by a channel named ‘Schony747 Trains Trams Planes’, the Ws are wrenched onto semi-trailers, and one makes a helpless plea via its destination display: “LOVE YOUR TRAMS”. Tram-lovers, also known as ‘gunzels’, laid down digital wreaths in the comments section: “She can rest now.”

‘Schony 747 Trains Trams Planes’, featuring flights landing at Tullamarine in 100 kilometreper-hour winds (one million views) and Z1-class trams going down Chapel Street (628 views), is run by Brenden Schonfelder. He is 54 years old, based at the Southbank depot and has driven trams for 22 years on routes such as the 1, 3, 5, 6, 19, 35, 48, 57, 64, 67 and 11.

“I give 150% in the role that I do, and I just built up knowledge,” he told me over the phone. I asked for his thoughts on the E-class trams Brian and I both disliked. He cited the security they offer drivers—a passenger on Bourke Street once tried to kill him, then jumped out and licked the windscreen—but his favourite model is the B-class: eighties-born, square-headed stalwarts that only come down Brunswick Street when they’re getting serviced in Preston.

“I think they’re the best tram ever built for Melbourne. They’re just a really good tram to drive. They’re smooth, they accelerate, there’s plenty of capacity… Man, I’m a big fan.”

Brenden’s enthusiasm for trams is infectious: between his YouTube channel and Facebook page he has 66,000 followers; recently, he set up another page called Trambook.

“You’re always going to have your enthusiasts and gunzels, and I’m one of them…Years ago, if you were a train or tram enthusiast, it’s like: ‘Oh, you’re a bit weird.’ But it’s very mainstream these days.”

(On a recent trip on the 11, I spoke about trams with a woman I met named Karen. She described an old friend: “There were all these tram nuts who knew the numbers. My friend’s nickname was 3172 or something, his favourite tram.”)

What I most wanted to know was what Brenden thought about the Route 11, given he’d driven it. I desperately hoped it was special.

“I don’t think there’s anything unique about it. The 96 is the busiest line on the network, but the Route 11 is your typical suburban route. It serves all the revellers that go out for drinks on Brunswick Street…and then further up you’ve got your old nonnos and Italians, and then you end up at West Preston with the Chinese shop, and you can get yourself some nice dim sims. It’s just something that sits in the background and does its job…But people are always going to relate to their particular tram route.” (The Chinese restaurant is called Moon Palace and you have already been given directions.)

Brenden was right. The comments on his hour-long video of a drive down the Route 11 weren’t filled with technical analysis, they were flooded with sentiment and innocent curiosity. “Now that I’ve left Australia, this video will remain as my memory,” wrote someone. “Is the St. Georges Motor Inn a nice place, or does it have a reputation?” asked another. “Bellesima travesìa en ese tranvìa”, admired another commenter, signing off from Tucumán, Argentina. And from one regular passenger: “Why am i watching my tram route at home lol”.

---

Well, why were we walking it? The answer became clear as the three of us sat idly on Gertrude Street, talking about young love and lamenting the hegemony of dating apps. Nowadays, people expect to find their better halves through algorithms rather than in bars. And while information technology might be able to send a message across the South Pacific in a millisecond, or help you Find Your Friend, it’s slowly turning us into nothing but cloud data: blips on a GPS that cannot place themselves. Half our lives play out in distant servers and most people’s ancestors are buried in or blowing through faraway countries. Bloodlines, songlines, tramlines: they’re not just a pair of metal tracks on the road, they’re a framework for thinking that makes meaning from the world around you.

“People spend far too much time looking at their devices than actually appreciating what they have,” Brenden told me. “Somebody will stand at the door looking at their phone, and won’t press the stop request button. But you know they’re getting off, so you stop the tram and open the door. They get off, just totally oblivious to what’s actually happened. Sometimes we actually have to think for people."

Tram drivers are alive to the interestingness of the real world and the people who live in it. Brenden loves talking to his usual passengers.

"I’ve got a lot of regulars that come up and say hi, and we have a bit of a chat before we take off to make sure they’re okay, you know. They become family after a while, in some respects.”

Ari has his regulars too, but also likes quietly taking notice of passengers and imagining their lives from afar.

“It’s incredible people watching. Sometimes I think about where they came from and where they’re going, and I make up a little story in my head. Sometimes you do the same table card all week, and the same people get on at the same time. You see them go through their week, what they’re wearing, whether they’re happy or stressed.”

Abbie had to go to work, but Phoebe and I downed our drinks and resumed our odyssey. We would be like tram drivers: we would do our thinking, looking and experiencing for ourselves. We beheld the trident spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral and watched newlyweds pose at the top of Collins Street. We swanned past the glitzy high-fashion storefronts and looked up at the high-rise building where the famous peregrine falcons live. (Were they witnesses when a man fell to his death, just down the road, in June this year? The police haven’t ruled out murder.) We passed the Charles Dickens Tavern, and then a school for pilots that online forums have denounced as a scam, picking up our pace as we entered the heart of the financial district. Countless bankers gesticulated on their way to lunch, some of them good marriage prospects, and so we continued our discussion about dating apps: unaware that in less than a month Phoebe would use one to meet… a tram driver. (Apparently, he says the only people who thank him are junkies, and that all drivers are ‘weird’.)

We knew we were near the finish line as we spotted the Melbourne Star—the city’s abandoned ferris wheel, left to rot on the skyline like the Spartans did to their deformed babies—and passed the headquarters of the Bureau of Meteorology. I wondered if they’d ever discover how to measure bad Feng-shui, because it was at crisis levels in the Docklands, but after reaching the end of the line it struck me how comforting I found the easygoing ugliness of the harbour. The Bolte Bridge didn’t care if it was pretty or not, and it wasn’t, and neither did the shiny black ducks bobbing on the water, and they were. My legs hurt from the walk and my head hurt from justifying the walk, but I retraced my steps back to the Caltex Reservoir and felt the same kind of peace I imagined tram driving had given Ari.

“It’s made me stop and really learn to be in the moment,” he told me. “To be physically and mentally and spiritually in the moment.”