From issue: Winter 2003
Trian of Thought
Jack Leigh, Heritage New Zealand's books editor, remembers that books
were fine until a train went past.
They held me up high to see Mickey Savage, the first Labour Prime Minister,
who was caught in a swirl of worshippers. He was either entering or getting
off a train at Auckland station. It was late 1935 and I was four. My parents,
who could scarcely see him themselves, wanted me to remember the moment,
which I do, dimly, beside the dazzling image of the train itself.
It stretched like the serpent tail of some panting, black beast with
fire in its belly that spurted steam from hidden orifices, belched coal
smoke and smelt of hot oil. I couldn't wait to be an engine driver, or
so I said.
That was my train of thought as I hurried to the old station one Sunday
afternoon to get some rail brochures. Train travel, once an essential
lifeline, now promises comfort and fun. Services are branded and marketed
with an eye to tourism - the Overlander, Northerner and TranzAlpine.
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| Nostalgia
- remember the old Railways china?
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Airline-type seats, reading lights, wakey-wakey calls, buffet cars and
scenic viewing facilities are the norm. Steam has gone but the romance
lives on.
Once our railway workshops built engines with a worldwide reputation.
Passenger facilities were less admired. On hellish overnight journeys
from Auckland to Taranaki in the 1940s, I recall, carriages detached at
Taumarunui were hauled off down the rugged Whangamomona line to Stratford.
Within an hour of poignant farewells in Auckland, all possible novelties
were exhausted and the clickety-clack of the rails, the seeping sootiness
and hard second-class seats became an ordeal between refreshment stops.
Mercer was one, hence Rex Fairburn's line, "The squalid tea of Mercer
is not strained." Then came Frankton Junction and others right down
the Main Trunk. Famished passengers would mob the counters for railways
pies, fruitcake and tea, all in chunky, toe-stubbing NZR crockery, which
would then litter the carriage aisles.
Ah, the railways of old, to which the 1930 Auckland station is a grand
and resounding tribute. Now a student hostel, it has a notice saying "This
is not the railway station," and giving directions that take me to
a scene of ghostly stagnation and along a partly demolished platform,
possibly the one where I saw Mickey Savage. At the very end is a glass-sided
ticket office and waiting room that would do Ngaruawahia proud. It is
closed and empty, and you wonder: Is rail travel top of the line or nearer
the end of it?
Sic transit gloria ...
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