Historical transport and planning documents now online

Link here: https://philam.github.io/archive/

When I was a planning student I discovered the treasure trove of the Architecture, Building and Planning Library. Among other things, it’s full of historical reports, images and documents related to planning and transport.

I spent many hours looking through these to find hidden gems that help to explain many aspects of Melbourne’s development.

Unfortunately, most of these are not easily available. While the State Government, the Public Records Office and some other libraries may possess these documents, they have not been uploaded online anywhere that I can find.

So I recently decided to help rectify this issue. This has involved taking photos of or scanning pages of these documents.

I should emphasise that these are all public materials that are already released and freely available. No confidential or private information is being published.

The documents will be progressively uploaded on a dedicated Github webpage here. It’s a bit basic at the moment but I will add a search function and other tweaks soon.

The reports are available as PDF documents that I have also run through OCR, which means that the text should be searchable.

So far the ones that I have uploaded are:

  • Metropolitan Strategy Implementation Plan 1981
  • Melbourne Transport 1985
  • MetPlan 1988
  • Southern Public Transport Link Feasibility Study 1991
  • Melbourne Transport Plan 1992

I will add more as I find, scan and prepare them. Unfortunately, some previous library users have written notes in the margins or on the pages – rest assured this was not me.

Hope they are useful!

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