FOLLOW THAT (RAILWAY) LINE
I have a fascination for the old railway lines and railway stations of New Zealand. As I have travelled around the country this past half century or so I have developed an ability to spot where railway lines used to be. I drive any passengers mad with gestures saying “Look, that’s where the railway line used to be …”
And the reaction is always, “Just keep your hands on the wheels, your eyes on the road and your mind on the job …”
I know that I share this fascination with millions of other fellow human beings – but perhaps just not those who are passengers in my vehicles.
When I am driving on a road, alongside which also ran a railway line at one stage, I try to imagine the sight of (probably) an AB Steam loco’ in shabby, sooty black, belching steam and smoke. In my mind it will be hauling maybe a dozen old fashioned, equally shabby, red, soot-stained, wooden carriages, tailed off by the traditional guard’s van wherein a man in uniform, wearing a peaked cap, spent a lonely existence with only himself to talk to, and keeping himself warm on winter trips with a small’ ‘Hot Dogge’ stove which, like the loco’, burnt coal.
Somehow I find it incongruous that these black, smoking, puffing monsters, running on steel rails actually lumbered alongside the road on which I am driving my car so effortlessly.
I think I understand where this fascination comes from. As a kid I grew up in Auckland, but my extended family was in Dunedin and we seemed to spend half of our life travelling in a Second Class NZR carriage, travelling between the two cities with the famous overnight ferry
