Victoria: Galloping Goose

In 1922, a gas-powered railcar numbered 15813 started rolling out of Victoria twice a day, hauling the mail and about thirty passengers into the country beyond. It was loud, it lurched, and it looked faintly ridiculous doing it, enough that people started calling it the Galloping Goose. The bird stuck. The railway did not. But the line it ran on cut a corridor fifty-five kilometres out of this city, and the eastern stretch of that corridor is what you're travelling now, straight ahead from this bridge over the harbour. Over the next couple of hours you'll cross tidal water on a timber trestle three hundred metres long, pass through warehouse blocks and back gardens, then farmland, then a gravel pit big enough to swallow a neighbourhood, then out to country that people fought to keep rural. It's a genuinely great ride, and it's also a reading, the coast's whole record laid out in order, port to farm to quarry to suburb, because a railway went broke and left the evidence lying in a line. Everything the last century and a half did to this place, it did along here, and you get to see it in sequence, at walking or riding pace, with salt water on one side of the morning and mountains at the end of it. Let's go.