Dad really hated trains.
Given the chance to try, he might actually have enjoyed the Japanese Bullet trains, or the
European TGVs, but the NSW Railway trains of the 20th century were
slow, dirty and often crowded. Until
cars and roads improved his travelling life from the mid-1950s, he was forced
to travel by rail and every trip was a horror.
I have earlier recounted his trips by bus to University in
Sydney from Lismore in the 1930s. (#52 Ancestors – Week 18). The trip by train was equally unpleasant, as
he describes here
“The train was not particularly
comfortable, consisting often of what we used to call “dog-box” carriages long
overdue for retirement, but at least offered some interest, provided, of
course, that you kept the windows shut to avoid being showered with tiny
particles of coal blown from the tender as the train hurtled (or more likely
crawled) down the coast.
It was the part of the journey covered
at night that was really hard to take.
After having already travelled for ten or eleven hours, you had to face,
when night fell, another twelve hours of extreme discomfort that had to be
experienced to be believed. If you were
affluent enough to afford a “sleeper”, you might not sleep very much but at
least you could get your head down and might even doze fitfully, enough, at least,
to give you the illusion of having slept a little. Or, if you were fortunate enough to have only
one other traveller in your compartment, you could both stretch out on a seat
and sleep in a sort of a way, interrupted only by the visits during the night
of a ticket examiner, or by the frequent stops of the train when it stood
stationary for what seemed like hours, or backed up for half a mile or so to
clear the line for a train travelling in the opposite direction. The worst misfortune would be for a belated
traveller to join the train and claim his right to a seat, thereby forcing you
to sit up.
If, however, as generally happened,
every seat in the compartment was occupied, then the night was really rugged,
as you squirmed first this way then that way, trying to get your head in a
comfortable position so that you could sleep sitting up. The upholstery on the seats was not even
comfortable for a passenger in a sitting position for whom it had been
designed. For trying to lie down or
sleep sitting up, it was excruciating.
All sorts of expedients were
tried. If there were not too many people
in the compartment, you could stretch out on the floor between the seats – that
is if you did not mind someone’s foot in your mouth, or if you were prepared to
seek cover as one of the occupants of the compartment decided to go to the
toilet. You could climb into the luggage
rack – if you were small enough and if it wasn’t already full of luggage, as it
usually was. If you were in what was
known as a “corridor carriage”, you could go out and lie down in the corridor –
except that there was usually a constant stream of passers-by to the toilet, so
that, in the end, you gave up and went back to your seat resigned to putting up
with the discomfort and praying for the morning to come soon.”
Train travel became even more
difficult during the war as troops crowded every train on the line. And then even more difficult once we children
came along.
For some crazy reason, Mum and Dad
travelled by train from Young (in SouthWest NSW) to Brunswick Heads (far north NSW) to
spend the long summer holidays. I don’t
know how often they did this, but they definitely did it in the summer of
1951/52, with three children (aged 6,2 and 1) and Mum six months pregnant.
Even today this is a 21 hour trip
requiring several changes of vehicle. In
those days there would have been at least two train changes – probably at
Cootamundra and Werris Creek – and almost certainly one would have been in the
middle of the night.
They did it, and I hope it was a good
holiday, because the return trip was a nightmare. One by one, the children became fretful and
hot. By the time they were nearly home,
all three had spots.
Chickenpox.
Small wonder then that when my
youngest brother, born in 1965, announced at the age of about 8 that he had
never been on a train, and it just wasn’t fair that he should miss out, it was
Mum who boarded the XPT with him in Dubbo and travelled overnight in a sleeper all the
way to Sydney.
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