Iam on the Very Slow Train from Canberra to Sydney.
Will it be discovered as an endangered industrial species, its habitat threatened by the Very Fast Train which has adapted to world of the nine-second sound grab and the mobile phone. It is being hunted to extinction by bus companies that offer a better price at $9 one way to Sydney and airlines that offer a 45-minute journey.
Can it, like the pygmy possum nibble a continued existence along the narrow corridor through Queanbeyan (7.16am), Bungendore (7.24am), Tarago (7.51am), Goulburn (a nice round 8.15am for a big city), Bundanoon, Mittagong, Bowral, Strathfield arriving at Central on time at 10.53am? Or will is sway like a brontosaurus to extinction?
At once I have great freedom and great restriction. Free to walk the aisles and peer through windows. Free to stretch my legs out or read a broadsheet newspaper in comfort. Impossible on a bus or plane.
Yet this train retains the remnants of an age of regulation when the masses had to be told what to do in great detail, with tautology, bizarre personification, double negatives, and the passive voice.
The first sign I see is that “”no alcoholic beverages are permitted on the train”, as if the alcoholic beverages have legs and can be ordered off.
I have in my bag an excellent bottle of red for the family occasion to which I am travelling. The buffet car serves alcohol, of course, but only during the regulated hours.
“”No unauthorised persons beyond this point.”
“”Trains must not . . . ” do any number of things that assume they have minds of their own.
At several stations huge posters say “NOTICE AS TO PENALTIES”.
The poster was perhaps a metre by half a metre with four columns of what could be no bigger than 6 point type. There were thousands of words. I calculated 12,000 (You have time to make those calculations on a train.)
I wanted to get off to read them. The opaque language of regulations is an art-form. It is especially exquisite when borrowed from England. I saw a similar poster in a park in London. Regulation 34 (I think) prohibited the beating of carpets. I wanted to see whether carpet-beating was permitted at Queanbeyan station. Alas the regulations prevented it.
The deep middle-aged voice that had earlier announced the station times came over in best failed pomposity, and in the passive voice: “”Passengers are reminded that this is a no-smoking train and it is advised that continuing passengers do not attempt to disembark at intermediary stations in order to smoke, as each short stop is only for passengers commencing or terminating their journey.”
The voice had no glimmer of humour as it tangled the passive with personification again. No hint of a smile at the image of a desperate smoker left behind furtively puffing while the train departs.
I can picture the smug satisfaction of the Victorian-age station-master upon the erection of that sign. As if behaviour is to be changed by the passing of a law. I spread out The Canberra Times and the banner headline read: “”Abortion furore”.
I had to settle for a photograph of the regulations poster, through two panes of glass. At Bungendore on the return journey someone was selling paintings, in obvious defiance or the regulations and severely jeopardising public order.
Trains were the first mass public transport. In the late 19th century when Britain still feared the mob and only recently had huge numbers of offences been removed from the death-penalty list, the mob were being allowed on to the trains. They had to be regulated.
Of course the mob, in the form of soccer hooligans, still inhabit the trains in Britain. But in rural Australia the clientele are entirely different. They are people with time and no money. The only thing they share with the mob is an utter indifference to the layers of regulation promulgated, but never enforced, by the rail authorities. My bottle of red was safe.
Train travel is vested with a history of dreadful regulation. World War mobilisations. Nazis at the last station before the Swiss border. “”Papers!”.
The clientele are pensioners, students, single mums with lots of baggage. It is not luggage. It is blankets, plastic bags full of cloth things. There are no fine compacts on wheels with extend-a-handles here.
They are regulated because their incomes come from the state, but they are free. They do not wear the restrictions of the double-breasted suit and the tight silk tie and polished shoes. They wear sneakers and sweat shirts and have the freedom to complete full-page crosswords in magazines which I thought had gone out of circulation years ago. I think I saw an Mandrake comic strip but she turned the page too quickly. Later she called me “”dearie” when I gave her my copy of The Sydney Morning Herald. She had the time to read, but not the money to buy.
Usually, I have the money, but not the time. But on this occasion, I rejected air and the illusory freedom of having my own car in Sydney to take the very slow train there and back. To travel in the luxury of time. I would have nine hours of freedom. Nine hours is an immense amount of time not to fill.
Into the Molonglo Gorge. Four carriages. One first class and three second class. About 250 seats, less than half full. The water is brown with foam and kangaroos travel with the train then dart off. Sheep, with heads ducked, bolt away.
For the Swedish tourist this was a travel adventure full of sharp images that only the big windows of a train can let you see. The great space of the Lake George plain comes into view. Such peopleless space is incomprehensible to Europeans. To us it is ordinary.
I recall a train trip across the Nubian desert in Sudan. For two of my Sudanese companions, it was an ordinary trip they did three times a year to Egypt. There was a two-hour wait at the only siding for the train coming the other way. The hypnotic drumming and wild, wild dancing on the desert sand was an ordinary event for Kahlid and Muhammad and now forgotten. Indeed, as members of Sudan’s tiny middle class they despised it as primitive.
The train stops the rush hour traffic of two cars in Bungendore. You get a slight feeling of superiority looking down at those in cars who have to wait to the tune of the repetitive ding-ding, ding-ding.
A man in a tie gets on at Bowral. Sports coat, check short, elastic-siders and Akubra. He is uncomfortable in the tie. His hands work outside. A conference, with a barrister in Sydney, perhaps. Or worse, an appointment with a medical specialist. His eyes did not invite conversation.
Onward to Sydney.
The voice tells us the next station. The voice has the discomfort of the inarticulate. As soon as they are put before a microphone or have to address a meeting without one, their language changes. They abandon the words of ordinary use.
Friends and relatives of passengers will “”disembark”, not get off.
The voice tells us we will arrive at the next station will be 10.31
I love the precision of railway timetables. There are few vicissitudes for a train that owns the whole track. No slow cars.
The return journey proved that wrong, though.
The voice told us that “”due to essential trackwork requirements” there would be a delay before we could “”proceed” . We stopped for about 10 minutes, before passing a group of workers standing with hands of shovels while another group were sitting on Eskies having an early lunch.
No wonder rail workers get such a bad name. How can they possibly work, while a train goes past. So the only time rail passengers see workers, is when they are idling. As soon as the train goes out of sight they are back hard at it moving railway sleepers in the bitter cold or hot sun. Indeed, the lot sitting Eskies must have planned their break to coincide with the train’s passing to reduce down time.
It’s exactly the opposite of firemen. We only see firemen dashing about the town with sirens flashing which must be only a tiny proportion of the working week. The rest is spent out of the public gaze waiting at the fire station.
Earlier the voice told us, “”The Buffet in Car A is now serving breakfast.”
The announcements are either in the passive voice (“”Breakfast is now being service in the Buffet in Car A) or they use a bizarre personification where inanimate objects (like the Buffet) take on human characteristics (like being able to serve breakfast).
Later I saw the reasoning behind these forms of announcements. No human had to take responsibility. Breakfast was miraculously served in the passive voice, or the buffet did the serving. Not “”Our Chef”, or the “”Maitre D”, or a human agent.
When I opened the foil to see what had been billed as a bacon omelette, I could see why no human would want to take responsibility for it.
The train was coming out of Canberra, but the sticker said it had been prepared by a Sydney company. The foil had prevent the Buffet from using the microwave (bad enough), but to reheat an omelette for half and hour in a full-heat oven invites gastronomic catastrophe. It resembled yellow polystyrene foam with bits of woodchip in it, presumably bacon.
The food had not changed since I last went on a train in rural Australia — from Wangaratta to Melbourne, to see Collingwood play St Kilda in a semi-final in 1966. The train stopped at Seymour station which had a beery, smoky buffet which served inedible pies swamped with taste-masking tomato sauce.
Yet the station was grand and elegant. I remember the enormous clock. It was so big you could see the end of the minute hand move. Also, we were doing Roman numerals at school, but the four on this clock was IIII, not IV. Have a look at the four on a Roman numeral watch, if you don’t believe me.
By the way, Collingwood’s performance was more disappointing than the pie.
On the return journey from Sydney 32 years later, little had changed, “”Devonshire tea will consist of two scones with fruit jam. We apologise for the unavailability of tea or coffee as earlier announced.”
The earlier announcement was, “We have been advised that due to the water situation in Sydney it will not be possible to serve tea or coffee on this journey to Can-Ber-A.”
It was a delicious piece of buck-passing to some anonymous higher authority who must be obeyed. Flexibility to deal with the unexpected is not the railway’s lexicon. With 12 hours notice, did anyone think to get some boiled water for tea and coffee? No, because Devonshire tea (without the tea, mind you) and the breakfast seemed to be served more as a social obligation than as profit-making exercise.
It was an enormous pity because the train had the space to create a four-star restaurant. Alas, its clientele could not afford it. And the clientele which can afford it travel by air where space dictates similar plastic service.
Will the VFT be different?
It should be. One of my fellow journalist junketeers in Japan did the cigarette test on the Osaka Tokyo line. The train was going 243km/h, according to the digital speed display. He balanced a cigarette upright on the window sill. It stayed upright for at least minute. You could dine well in that carriage. And unlike the plane the trip to Sydney central would be in one bite, not swapping between plane and taxi. You could plug you computer and mobile in and work, if needed.
The trouble with air, and maybe a VFT, is that the space and distance between city and destination is lost. City is just city whether Melbourne or Adelaide or Sydney. In Japan, the VFT (or bullet train) makes Osaka and Tokyo the same city.
Will Canberra ever be the same city as Sydney with VFT? The Founding fathers should have put a greater minimum distance between us than the Constitution’s 100 miles. The VFT could subsume us.
Meanwhile, the Very Slow Train moves on. On the approach to every station, a row of workers’ Federation cottages faces the track. Goulburn has more than the others. Don’t the workers need views.
Goulburn Station has a splendid marble war memorial in the wall with the names in black lead. Queanbeyan, Bungendore and Mittagong stations are built like 19th century banks. Solid brick. Now painted beige with brown corner highlights, though some like Goulburn are returning to Federation colours, rich green and burgundy.
These should not have 1980s trains, but steam.
Our train moves on. Alas it is not steam, nor is the trim wood or the seat upholstered in leather or cloth. Rather they are airline style seats. At least there are no mobile phones. (Ha! The regulators didn’t think of that.)
But a youth is listening to a CD through headphones. I can hear the pulsating hiss five seats away. God knows that was bouncing and echoing through the cavities of his head.
Picton. One of the first towns by-passed by the Hume Highway is also by-passed by the train. The highway used to twist round and under a railway tunnel. Many were killed there.
We are an hour out of Sydney and the voice tells us, “”The Buffet car will be closing shortly for stocktake and revenue procedures.”
With stock like that, I couldn’t understand why they need an hour to count the revenue.
Sydney. The train is elevated and I can see right into back gardens and spy oblivious occupants in back kitchens. But it is, at least, a noiseless prying, unlike aircraft overhead or the menace of the car.
Motorways now hide suburban and town life. They by-pass towns. If they go through suburbs they have been pushed through after the creation of suburb so huge sound barriers have been erected.
The train flashes through suburban stations. Blank faces turn expectantly and then go blank again. We arrive at Central.
In truth it is not a very slow train. It makes it in 4 hours 20 minutes. A car can get to the outskirts of Sydney in under three hours, but it always take another hour and half of tense fury to get anywhere else in the city. The best laid plan through Gregory’s pages (with turned-down corners on each sequential pages) is invariably wrecked by a critical NO RIGHT TURN sign at the extremity of Page 174. It is followed by NO LEFT TURN, NO U-TURN and NO STOPPING.
Why do visitors complain about Canberra’s roundabouts. At least they give the stranger a sporting chance. You can do a couple of laps of honour until you are sure where you are and where you want to go. Another one of those Canberra paradoxes.
And another awaits me on return to Canberra station. I want to read the Notice as to Penalties. But here in the heart of bureaucracy, it was not there.