We wish to bring attention to a natural but slightly hidden problem, posed by Erdős and Nešetřil in the late 1980s, an edge version of the degree--diameter problem. Our main result is that, for any graph of maximum degree $Δ$ with more than $1.5 Δ^t$ edges, its line graph must have diameter larger than $t$. In the case where the graph contains no cycle of length $2t+1$, we can improve the bound on the number of edges to one that is exact for $t\in\{1,2,3,4,6\}$. In the case $Δ=3$ and $t=3$, we obtain an exact bound. Our results also have implications for the related problem of bounding the distance-$t$ chromatic index, $t>2$; in particular, for this we obtain an upper bound of $1.941Δ^t$ for graphs of large enough maximum degree $Δ$, markedly improving upon earlier bounds for this parameter.