The answer is yes. Even if the successor to the churches involved is much less heard from today.
A hundred years ago various interests staked claims on what Sundays should be about. Articles about this were then common in newspapers. Most notably in Melbourne, the varying political influence of those making these claims determined whether public transport operated on Sunday mornings, and, later, how frequently it ran.
It's an interesting history so, aided by a Melbourne Tram Museum article and Trove newspaper archives, it's worth asking why this is.
Unions
First the unions. Australian unions were the first in the world to win an eight hour day. However, until 1939, this typically involved a full day's work on Saturday. That is a 48 hour week with Sunday off.
Sunday was seen as a day of rest, and, as wages grew, recreation also included picnics and excursions. Between the wars, before most families owned cars, pressure mounted on the railways and tramways to operate Sunday trips.
A reasonable-length day in the Dandenongs or at an outlying beach required a departure before noon. Especially in the summer for people wishing to have some time before it got very hot.
The problem was that suburban trains and trams didn't run Sunday mornings for much of the early 1900s.
Churches
The protestant churches, notably Presbyterian, Methodist and Wesleyan denominations, wanted to keep it that way. Thus ensuring that the Sabbath remained free of trams grinding around corners and ringing bells. Sunday morning public transport was not seen as useful to churchgoers as it was assumed that most people would walk to their nearest suburban church.
Having said that other less politically influential denominations supported Sunday morning public transport. There were also differences between CBD and suburban churches, with the former seeing it not as a vice but as a means to enlarge their congregations.
Railways
Trains actually did operate on Sunday mornings at the turn of last century, albeit with significant gaps in timetables. However they were opposed by churches, did not recover their costs and railway workers did not like giving up their Sunday mornings.
Essendon lost its Sunday train in 1903, despite local opposition. More dramatically state cabinet agreed to discontinue trains on all lines before 1pm in 1905. The decision was described as 'a stage of virtue not been matched by any other Australian city, not even Adelaide, the city of churches'.
The difference between what workers wanted to do and what churches thought they ought to do was partly resolved in the 1920s in favour of the former when the railways commenced Sunday morning excursion trains in 1928. These proved popular, reviving travel to beachside locations. Despite a less favourable climate Melbourne was luckier than other cities in that several lines, such as Altona, Williamstown, Sandringham and Frankston, had virtually beachside stations.
It may have been significant that the railways had a working class skewed often Catholic workforce. The video below, on the 1955 Labor split, had the Australian Railways Union as one of the 'Groupers', after a period of communist leadership. Catholics in the unions may have been less worried than Protestants about working Sundays provided they got good penalty rates. If they were concerned it might have been more about family leisure time than attending church, especially as the latter's attendance rate fell.
Melbourne has rarely had one metropolitan public transport mode that can be considered head and shoulders above the others. For example trains were typically faster than trams but came less frequently. Residents of suburbs like Northcote and Brunswick with closely parallel lines must typically choose between speed and frequency - they have no mode that delivers both (although they used to when trains were more frequent and trams faster).
Another train/tram trade-off is span of hours versus frequency on Sunday mornings. Since Night Network started in 2016 trains on weekends do not have the later Sunday starts that still afflict most tram routes. However trains are often less frequent, with this distinction most prominent on the Craigieburn, Upfield, Mernda, Hurstbridge, Sandringham and Pakenham lines where 40 (and occasionally 70) minute Sunday morning intervals exist. This compares unfavourably with Sydney and Perth, which typically operate a 15 minute Sunday morning frequency on most if not all lines.
Timetable upgrades are rarely completely 'greenfields', even if doing so might add less than 1% cost. Where a train timetable does get greatly upgraded in Melbourne, and of all the lines Frankston's has had the most improvement in the last thirty years, there is almost always a remnant of a past service pattern left.
This can be seen on the Good Friday and Christmas Day (most years) schedule which uses the old pre Night Network Sunday timetable complete with its late morning starts. The result is that on these holidays the first train (9:24am) arrives at Frankston about 10 to 20 minutes after key longer distance bus routes 781, 782 and 887 leave.
Unlike (say) Sydney, whose train service levels look thoroughly modern every day of the week, the way that Melbourne schedules its trains may make an improvement but still retains, and in some cases exacerbates, decades-old historical quirks.
Melbourne's atavistic rail service funding and planning culture meant that the option to add two or three early morning trips to the holiday Sunday timetable when Night Network was added so that there would be wide spans 365 days of the year was never taken up. This is despite the trivial cost involved (a handful of extra trains per year per line as the wide span already exists on the other 363 days).
This culture of leaving the basic Sunday morning timetable alone even when service at other times improves remains in 2025. We know this because despite despite other aspects of its service improving (in this case interpeak going from every 15 to every 10 minutes) the Sandringham line's Sunday service (which includes 40 minute morning gaps) will remain unchanged according to the government.
The 'stickiness' of certain features of Sunday morning timetables doesn't just affect Metro lines. V/Line timetables have similar issues in its retention of late weekend starts for Geelong and Melton even after other parts of those weekend timetables got upgraded. Though in this case you can't entirely blame 1920s Sabbatarianism because the late starts exist (to a lesser extent) on Saturdays as well as Sundays and the Geelong line actually has a better 7 - 9am Sunday frequency than major Melbourne lines like to Ringwood, Mernda, Greensborough, Sandringham and more.
Do decades-old historic remnants survive in our Sunday tram timetables too? Keep reading!
Tramways
Ballarat trams ran on Sunday mornings, though the service was discontinued in 1906, with low patronage given as the reason. Melbourne trams in 1905 did not operate on Sunday mornings, though as noted above some of its trains still did.
Trams had never run on Sunday mornings and were not about to start. A proposal accepted as technically feasible got voted down in 1915 after church objections. Note that this vote was taken when trams were run under groups of councils, ie before the formation of the MMTB.
Sunday morning service came up numerous times under the MMTB but kept getting rejected for different reasons, even though Sydney trams ran without incident. Claims were made that Sunday morning trams would be poorly used. However when trams were replaced by buses, which did run Sunday mornings, usage was high. But the now electric trams continued not to run Sunday mornings with controversy remaining, especially given that trains were now operating.
The impasse was broken when MMTB Chairman Alex Cameron was forcibly retired in 1935 to be replaced by his deputy HH Bell (who supported Sunday morning service).
In 1936 Bell proposed a 6 month trial of Sunday morning trams on all but the Footscray network. Trams would operate every 30 minutes from 8am until the regular afternoon timetable started at 1pm. Families could buy discount tickets for trips beaches or Wattle Park, a move fiercely opposed by churches and the Womens Christian Temperance Union. But the people had spoken, with patronage exceeding expectations and Sunday morning trams becoming permanent. The profits on them even offset the losses incurred by running all night trams, which also started in 1936.
Decades later...
Though hard to read, this 1984 tram timetable for Route 72 in Camberwell had approximately an 8am start and then two trams per hour on Sunday mornings until about 1pm.
Some quieter tram routes were replaced by buses on Sundays in the 1960s. They remained that way until the mid 1990s. An example was Route 3 from Malvern East which ran as bus route 377 on Sundays.
Recent timetables indicate further, albeit minor, improvements to Sunday morning tram services since. The biggest recent example (from nearly a decade ago in 2016) was all night service restored on six tram routes on weekends as part of Night Network.
Route 3 (which for a while operated as Route 3a via St Kilda on weekends) got a slightly earlier Sunday start. Also the time that a 20 minute or better service operated was made earlier.
The Network Development Plan (Metropolitan Rail) from 2012 had a coordination framework based on 10 and 20 minute maximum waits on all main routes but this has yet to be implemented on most train, tram and major bus lines. This record demonstrates that Melbourne tram timetables are set in concrete almost as firm as that Sir Robert Risson insisted be used for their tracks.
Modern opinion
Where would working class people and churches (the main protagonists in the 1920s regarding Sunday morning public transport) stand these days regarding Sunday morning tram and train services?
The 'Continental Sunday' so dreaded by Methodists last century has become a reality in Melbourne. It is made possible by a massive casual and part-time student and foreign-born labour force who toil so that middle to upper income tourists and local Monday to Friday workers can enjoy being fed and entertained away from home.
These workers need frequent and connected public transport over wide hours but too rarely get it, especially on Sunday mornings. Thus 2025's new working class needs Sunday morning public transport for their livelihood, not just for leisure excursions as more the case a century before.
Unlike in the 1920s when union coverage was higher, Melbourne's diverse service-sector proletariat who are more likely to work nights and weekends (when public transport is scarcest) is highly casualised and non-unionised. This bias might be why you rarely hear unions, whose advocacy priorities are shaped by members, call for better public transport services (though you might sometimes hear them demanding free parking).
Then there is the matter of the relative influence of various unions in the current Labor government. Aided by cheap credit, construction unions like the CFMEU have undoubtedly been most successful, winning billions worth of work for members from Project 10 000, known today as the 'Big Build' of massive road and rail projects. Had the TWU and RTBU been similarly influential in winning work we would have trains, trams and buses running every 5 to 10 minutes across the network all week. But they haven't been and we don't.
As for the established Christian churches, their influence dropped in both major political parties and the general community.
Jeff Kennett's 'work hard play hard' free-market Liberals were not the same party as the disparate but effective coalition (which included socially conservative womens' groups who won what we would today call quotas in organisational party positions) that Robert Menzies assembled in the 1940s.
Religious influence in Victorian Labor waned when the party split in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s when secular 'new left' voices within it became louder. There was some revival of Catholic influence when ex-Grouper unions (like the SDA) were readmitted to Labor in the '80s. But electorally and in the composition of the parliamentary parties, secularism continued its march through the Labor ranks in the 1990s while Catholics (eg Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull) and evangelicals (eg Scott Morrison) were replacing previously dominant mainline Protestants and Anglicans in the Liberals.
Meanwhile falling and ageing congregations caused many neighbourhood churches to close or merge. The Methodists and Presbyterians who most opposed Sunday morning transport were not immune, with these amalgamating into the Uniting Church in 1977.
The rise of mega-churches and religious diversity has made it decreasingly probable that adherents walk to their chosen place of faith. Church, mosque and temple car parks are huge, sometimes getting government grants to expand. Also buying more land than the building strictly needs, with the balance used for parking, may also assist land-banking, contributing to the church's long-term asset base.
It is now much more likely that faith communities would support rather than oppose better public transport on Sunday mornings, although their use of sites in often unserviced fringe or industrial areas can make providing this harder.
Conclusion
There have been some Sunday morning service improvements on some tram and train routes. However their roll-out has been snails' pace, with per capita service still generally in decline, especially for trams. This decline comprised actual cuts to frequencies in the 1950s and 60s as the MMTB battled falling usage and rising wages, then a general stagnation in service for most decades since.
No Sunday timetable improvement this century has matched Kennett's big 1999 service boosts for network reach across metropolitan train and tram. The only rival were the 2013 Metro upgrades which doubled Sunday (and for that matter Saturday also) train frequencies from 20 to 10 minutes to Ringwood, Dandenong and Frankston. However, like the 1999 changes these were only in the 11am to 7pm timeslot, leaving service outside those times infrequent. This is unlike the 2017 Sydney train timetable upgrade which delivered all-week 15 minute frequencies between 4am and midnight at most stations.
The long-running bugbear of late Sunday morning starts was partly addressed in 2016 when Night Network started, especially for the train network. However early trains still skipped Southern Cross (essential for Skybus and other connections) and frequencies were still atrociously low with up to 70 minute gaps. All Good Friday and most Christmas Day timetables were not improved, with some made worse. As for trams, most routes did not gain Night Network service so their late Sunday starts and 30 minute gaps remained.
It is unlikely that Commissioner Bell, who designed the basic Melbourne Sunday morning tram service pattern of an 8am start with 30 minute frequencies, would have envisaged that his six month trial in 1936 would still be determining tram times nearly 90 years later. Many buildings have had shorter lives than service frequencies on a timetable, even though (in theory) it should be possible to more easily adjust the latter based on community needs.
With there now no organised opposition to improved Sunday morning public transport service, the only barrier to this is the government's political priorities. Which in public transport has been to value large infrastructure builds more highly than working it harder to provide a useful service all week, particularly evenings and weekends.
Some tram routes do now operate every 20 minutes from first tram on Sundays. But at the current rate of progress it is possible, even probable, that some 30 minute Sunday morning tram frequencies might remain in 2036, marking a century of a trial frequency only intended to be for six months.
