A Sydney Institution.

Hastings Standard, Issue 127, 22 September 1896, Page 4

A Sydney Institution.

One of the institutions of Sydney (says the Bulletin) is the " Drunks' Train"—the midnight train from Parramatta on Saturday night. All the Saturday night drunks who live in the railway suburbs take a zig-zag course for this train, and are helped in by their friends, or the railway officials, or by other drunks. Then the porters bang the door carefully, for at nearly every door some excited person has his head in the road, and the heaving mass of beer and song and blasphemy rolls away into the darkness, with its feet in its hat, and its collar burst, and the ash from its pipe getting iuto its eye. Most of the in mates ara regular passengers, and when the sleeping drunks reach their respective stations they are generally identified, unless they are unrecognisable through mud, and dragged out by the guard or by the hand of Providence. The strange or unknown drunk goes right on to Parramatta, and is thrown out there because the train goes no further, and hangs over the* rail till morning trying to identify hiMteelf. Parramatta is a more interesting place at 2 a.m. on Sunday than at any other time, owing to the inebriated strangers from down the line fore-gathering outside the milwaystation and lighting matches to fey and find out their own names and addresses, and endeavoring to undress under trees. A few hoars later, about daybreak, a saddened procession discovers its whereabouts, by reading the board at the railway-station, and starts

for home in the various ways more or less circuitous and wobblesome, and those who are left behind ascertain their names by finding them on the charge-sheet on Monday morning.