The Outer Circle Line, built between 1888 and 1891, ran a distance of about 20km between Oakleigh and Fairfield. It was designed to get goods trains from Gippsland into Spencer Street Station and bypass a privately owned railway, but the short-lived experiment failed in a dramatic way.
Bureaucratic bungling and political corruption meant an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money was wasted. The fragmented railway was closed and re-opened a number of times with mixed success.
Today’s Alamein line is the only surviving section of the original railway, which once traversed Camberwell, Balwyn, Deepdene, East Kew and the Chandler Highway Bridge, as well as East Malvern and Oakleigh.
