I remember when.....

Memory is a strange thing. I wonder why it is that I can recall a quote of my early high school years that even now amuses me: 

They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen.

It’s author GK Chesterton was even then an old fashioned writer and later as a secondary school English teacher I wondered why anyone would choose his essays as suitable text for 14 year olds.

But those were the days of the prescribed  cannon. 

On re-reading  On Running After One’s Hat and The Secret of a Train I understand it was his literary genius that we were meant to appreciate.  

I think of Chesterton  and I think of quaint train travel, but I wish the quote I had remembered of his was : 

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated, 

or

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected

(Wikipedia)

As a child, before I became politically jaded by weasel words and wriggling rhetoric,  we travelled everywhere by train. There was no family car. We lived in a railway town where the soot from regular steam services settled on the newly washed sheets and led my mother to curse. I remember the first time the Southern Aurora travelled through from Sydney to Melbourne and we were up in the pre-dawn to watch it pass – as significant to our lives as the Olympic torch passing by for the Melbourne games.

It was a rite of passage to take the train the 25miles to the regional shopping centre and spend the day gazing at the array of merchandise not available in our small country town. 

The train took us on family holidays to New England and occasionally to the North Coast.

When I was at boarding school the trip backwards and forwards at the start and end of term held great expectation and relief. At each stop we collected or deposited an assortment of ‘jaffas’ in their pressed maroon knife pleated serge tunics, gold blouses, berets and boaters, gloves and stockings. We were straight out of an English children’s novel.

As an adult I essentially gave up train travel. It seemed slow, cumbersome and somewhat antiquated.

I did make an eight day train journey from Singapore to Chang Mai in 2006.  It was an organised tour for 400 runners with a drinking problem, who were headed for our biennial world gathering. We were farewelled at the station by a meandering dancing dragon with accompanied drummers, offloaded at various stops to run through the jungle and be treated with local festivities and sumptuous feasts.  But I was reminded that there is an enormous chasm between the romantic notion of train travel and the reality. We were never on time, the seating was hard and uncomfortable, and like everywhere,  I had forgotten that things ‘back on’ to railway lines, so were often treated to the mounds of accumulated garbage  behind people’s houses as we made our way up the Malay Peninsula.  Don’t get me wrong, the adventure was amazing, but the train travel left a lot to be desired.

Recently in Singapore I travelled everywhere by train. Now there’s a system to learn from.

I’ve been hearing about rail services quite a bit lately. Public comment is about to start on the light rail between Canberra Civic and the northern suburbs. Yesterday Radio National featured a program on the future of rail travel and the billions of dollars and 45 years that a feasibility study has revealed it would cost to upgrade the system between Brisbane and Melbourne to modern times. I learnt that  one of the reasons it takes longer to travel by rail than road is that the latter route  between Sydney and Melbourne adds  100 extra kilometres in order to accommodate reduced gradients and steep  curves on a line that has a speed limit of 80kph.

As a senior I get to travel by train on a reduced rate. Just a couple of weeks ago I booked a ticket to see Paul Simon at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. I decided that I would take the train. I booked a first class seat. I had not been on an Australian country train since the early 1970’s. Little had changed. Admittedly there were no metal feet warmers thrown on at Goulburn – but that may have been because we are not yet into winter. 

But I could still get a pie and sauce at the buffet car, and an announcement to say we were not to sleep in the aisle and the luggage racks. We rattled along at a leisurely pace and the world was again 1956.

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This Weeks Art Work:

View from another 19th Century form of transport

Ballooning over Hall. Acrylic on canvas board. 780x560 mm

 

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