V/LineCars.com - the online resource for those interested in the day to day operations, carriages and railcars in service with V/Line - in the present, past and future!

This site endeavours to provide you with interesting and detailed information regarding the operations of V/Line services, and the several types of carriages and carriage sets V/Line uses in its day to day operations, and also their Sprinter and VLocity diesel railcars.

Site history

2002

A young Matt Julian creates Matt’s Cars Page, listing the composition of V/Line’s carriage sets.

View old site via Internet Archive.

2005

Matt’s Cars Page is expanded into V/LineCars.com.

Hi All,

My new website (well, the return of the old Matt’s Cars Page in a totally new and upgraded format :-p), V/LineCars.com, is now online for all to see, use as a reference, and learn!

Feel free to take a look around - there’s plenty of pages and photos up there - and there’s still more to come!!!!

http://www.vlinecars.com

View old site via Internet Archive.

2008

The site continues to be expanded, with additional content, news about V/Line operations, and continually updated carriage set listings.

View old site via Internet Archive.

Work also starts on the Carriage Information Management System that will drive an upgraded site.

The aim of this project is produce a web based content management system to collate and display the history of Victorian railway carriages and carriage sets.

The current methods of managing content and history data of railway carriages and carriage sets are cumbersome and time consuming, both during creation and subsequent updates. Some way of automating this process needs to be created, so that when information is altered in one place, all other instances of it will reflect this.

Data will include histories of carriages, carriage types, and carriage sets, and users will be able to browse this in various ways. A form of content management system, the system will also allow descriptions and other pages to be edited and presented from the database, so the system will enable the management of a complete website.

View the source code on GitHub.

2009

Despite an expanded team, the carriage set listings at V/LineCars.com become out of date, despite the intention to put a new site online by February 2009.

View old site via Internet Archive.

2010

Early 2010 was the new target date for the upgrade site, which comes and goes.

View old site via Internet Archive.

2013

March 2013 sees a change to the splash screen, as the team intend to rebuild the site.

Sadly, vlinecars.com has been strongly neglected in the past 5 years, primarily due to higher education and the entry into the full time workforce of myself and fellow team members working on the site.

The information is still being collected, photos being taken, sightings being noted, just nothings being published! The new website which should be easier to maintain is around 80% complete, however, I’d like to be able to relaunch the site as a completed product, which its far from (only about 30% of the existing pages have been converted)

It shocked me just the other day (24/6) that it had been 6 years since I’d chartered BS217 to operate on the day return Swan Hill pass to celebrate the end of regular service for BS cars; time seems to move so much faster now that I’m getting older!

I’m starting to think now that the best option might be to relaunch the page sooner than later and start off again similar to its original roots of “Matt’s Cars Page” from 12 years ago; start small and progressively build it up…..it’s a better option than leaving it in its current form!

View old site via Internet Archive.

2016

The V/LineCars.com team loses control of the vlinecars.com domain name, it is purchased by a driving school, followed by a domain squatter who ran a blog about coffee tables!

2018

V/LineCars.com regains the vlinecars.com domain name and relaunches the site in memory of Matt Julian.