Nióht Express AO KORERO REPORT

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 20, 9 October 1944, Page 20

Nióht Express AO KORERO REPORT

Unshaven, limbs cramped, hungry, need of a bath, dreary, black from soot, and in temper, that cigarette —your thirtieth —tastes as pleasant as the smoke in the carriage from the tunnels. A morning as grey as your mood. But you’re there. “Is that all your luggage ? ” asks the taxi-driver. It is the end of a journey. A journey by Night Express. Night Express. Wellington, three o’clock the afternoon before miles through an island, sixteen hours —Auckland, seven o’clock in the morning if you’re not late. All through the night you travel. “ It’s probably a unique train journey ; no other quite like it,” someone said. Sure, you just ask the Americans. You do ; and they tell you about dining coaches, observation cars, ice water, and high speeds. About not an island, but a continent to cross. But they’ll also tell you that no line in their country has had to be tunnelled, dug, pushed, ripped, and torn through such impossible engineering country. They’ll say it is “ the height of human impudence to have built a railroad through such an alpine geological curiosity shop.” They’re right. The four hundred miles or more of track from Wellington to Auckland has thirty-two tunnels ; it includes mountain

ranges and rivers, wide, meandering, and torrents, deeply-cut, rushing; it is over the amazing Raurimu Spiral; it has a complexity

slopes and steps and barriers ; it runs through shifting swamps and under crumbling cliffs. It has little of the straight run of plains. You forget your dreariness and think of the bridges and viaducts and tunnels, you realize that its construction is an engineering miracle. But a miracle that had to be planned and drawn and skilfully considered; its theory carried into practice no less exactingly. Question : Is there anywhere in New Zealand with the confusion of noise and people and busyness of the Wellington Railway-station before the departure of the Auckland express. Answer: Probably not. Knots of people, hats and coats and suitcases, talking, hurrying, in your way. Babies crying. Queues for left luggage, queues outside the barrier, queues for permits, for tickets, for reservations, queues outside the R.T.O.’s office of Navy serge, Air Force blue, Army khaki. “ Mind there, gangway please ” —you move quickly before you’re knocked flat by the porter and her electric trolley piled high. That small boy must be lost. People, milling crowds of people. A wedding party, bright with clothes and laughing, showers of confetti. A Provost station patrol stamps past; subconsciously, guiltily, you move aside. Crowds in the refreshment-rooms, crowds

at the bookstalls, crowds outside the barriers talking, almost shouting at their friends inside the bars. Eleven minutes to go. Above it all is the loud-speaker. Nothing can drown those instructions. “ All seats, all aboard for the Auckland express. All seats, please. Show your ticket and reservation at No. 6 platform gate ... all seats, please . . six minutes ... all seats . hurry on . . . telegram for Mr. ” A train whistles, a bell clangs, interrupting. But it’s not for you. The talking and bustling and noise grow greater. It takes you all your time to move. And it’s “ All seats, please. All aboard for the Auckland express.” The last call. You hurry. So does everyone else. What a bedlam there is on that station. Half an hour later all is quiet. The building is deserted. There is the calm and the dignity of a cathedral. Just a little dirtier though, a little more untidy. Fourteen carriages—ten second class, four first. No sleepers these wartime nights. A big train. It means approximately four hundred passengers are travelling. They’re mostly servicemen. It’s almost a troop train. The minute bell clangs. Some one rushes wildly through the barrier. He couldn’t have cut it any finer. And you’re off. Slowly, smoothly you leave the station. Until Paekakariki, the other side of the first line of hills and the several tunnels, the first stop, the long heavy train of carriages and vans is drawn by an electric engine. Such a load is hard work. The speed is slow. It would take a long time to Auckland at this rate ; it takes a long time even to Paekakariki, to the first cup of tea. It’s pleasant, though ; the afternoon sun streams through the window, warm on your face. Comfortably you lie back in your seat, head on pillow, not reading yet, looking at the last blue windy-wet glimpses of Wellington Harbour. Smack into a tunnel. As fast from darkness to sunshine. The journey has begun. The carriage is cheerfully noisy with laughter and talk ; someone strums a banjo, there is singing, a mouth-organ. It is also tidy, the floors clean, luggage

orderly in the racks, the passengers straight in their seats. Reserves for the journey are marshalled and reviewed ; cakes in a tin, oranges for thirst, the smoke of cigarettes and pipes is blue in the sunshine. A forbidden bottle of beer—“ careful, digger, here’s the guard ” —and if you’re playing cards, seats turned inwards; pillows for a table, be careful not to show any money because that’s not allowed either. You’re moving, pulling powerfully, through hills, the sun is setting. Almost evening, soon night. Professor Joad was surprised recently when he walked through a troop train on a long journey in England to find so few of the passengers with books to read. To him it seemed such a waste of time ; he counted, he said, more than a hundred servicemen before he found one reading a novel. You have a look for yourself. You share the professor’s surprise : here is a journey of sixteen hours and in the five carriages you walk through there is hardly a bound book to be seen. Digests are everywhere, picture magazines almost as common. There’s a Korero — but no books. Maybe it doesn’t mean a thing ; maybe it’s just that people with luggage to pack, a hundred things to do, a train to catch, just haven’t the time to think of hours that will be free, of books to read. Also, if you’re leaving one city for another, you don’t take away library books ; and if you’re on soldier’s pay you don’t spend 12s. 6d. on a novel for sleepy train times. You leave Professor Joad to be surprised by himself. Through the long hours, the miles of the night, there are changes from the gay talk and the orderly carriages. Early morning, hardly light, shows a different picture. The first impression now is of overcoats and scarfs and hats and luggage ; the sprawling figures you see second. Pillows are soiled with soot and smoke. The floor is untidy with the litter of a journey. The air is heavy and stale. An occasional grunt, a curse as someone stumbles in the half-light over an outstretched leg, the annoying rattle of a window, a blind, the striking of a brightly-yellow match—they are the only noises now. There is no talking.

And all the time the rhythmic clackety-clackety-clack of steel wheels on steel rails, of speed through the night. Even the clipping of tickets is not the perfunctory business it may appear. You ask the guard. If he’s got time he’ll tell you. He’ll also tell you that it’s only one of his jobs. The internal affairs of that whole train are, in fact, his responsibility. The safety and comfort of those four hundred passengers have his care and attention. It

takes many years to know the needs of that job, the ordinary routine ; and, in addition, there are special instructions for every trip that must not be forgotten. Each ticket has to be carefully clipped, its validity checked ; possible errors in issuing must be looked for, misuse detected. The work has to be done methodically, not a minute wasted. And all the time other and equally important mattershave to be kept in mind. A reduction in speed, not noticed by passengers, has its significance for the guard. From the carriage door he reaches for a tightly-folded piece of paper from a wayside station official. The train picks up speed again. The guard reads the note —the crumpled piece of paper is a crossing order, an important message telling him that the scheduled crossing with a train from “up the line ” has been altered. Ticket clipping is resumed, questions answered, seats found ; by the time that guard is back in his own compartment the next stop is not far away. A few puffs of a cigarette, but there are still reports and returns to be finished, letters sorted and pidgeoned-holed ready for delivery at the right stations. And to ensure as short a delay as possible at stopping stations, piles of luggage and parcels have to be looked over and sorted.

Ten minutes for refreshments. Crowds rush the counter. But there is no cup of tea for the guard. A dozen things have to be attended to before the clang of the minute bell, the blast of the whistle, the smooth turning of the wheels. The station is left black in the night. Hurricane lamp swinging, the guard makes his careful way through the sleeping train for fresh tickets to clip, if necessary (these days, if possible) to find seats for the latest arrivals. At the next stopping station he is to hand over to another guard. Before then everything has to be squared up. Less than an hour later he will take over the running of a south-bound express, for another four hours’ rush before he is finished for the night. It will be daylight before he is in bed, but his sleep won’t be disturbed. With so much to do and the responsibility for the comfort of several hundred passengers, his working-time has been fully taken up. But everything has gone smoothly ; for him it is all in the night’s work. * You giggle. You can’t help it. You’re in the cab of the engine. Behind is seven tons of coal, or what is left of it; in front a mass of gauges and levers and handles. The huge fire in the huge furnace is almost frightening in its intensity. The fireman looks strong and tough enough to lay low any man in the world—except the driver. That engine is not troubled with mountain ranges. It has power to spare ; and everything of it is a sign of its strength. But you giggle to yourself. You can’t help it—because in front of the furnace, neatly on the floor, is a tiny household hearth brush, painted cherry-red. You’ve talked yourself into a ride in that cab. While you’re waiting, a small

boy on his father’s back looks eagerly through the entrance just as the fireman swings a shovel of coal on to the roaring fire. “ Ooooh,” he asks, “is he going to boil his billy ? ” It’s some billy. One hundred and thirty tons of it. To keep it boiling means a lot of work for that fireman, no chance to let up—mile after mile of hard, dirty, sweating work in cramped conditions that would have even a physically-fit man in agony before the top of the first rise. No wonder this fireman’s muscles look as strong as the steel of the engine.

Engine, one hundred and thirty tons ; train, nine hundred tons; coal, seven tons; fireman, 198 lb. You can’t help being impressed. But you wouldn’t like his job. You smile at the red hearth brush and the small boy while you’re waiting for the journey to continue. If you haven’t ridden before in the cab of

an express engine that’s about all the amusement you’re going to get for the next hundred miles. Since you were five years old you’ve wanted to ride in the engine of an express. Now you wonder why. It takes about three minutes to come to the conclusion your ideas have been misdirected.

You wouldn’t think a one hundred and thirtyton engine would jump. It does. It also leaps, sways, kicks, thumps, jiggles, jogs, twists, turns, knocks, snorts, roars, rumbles, rears flings, swings, and shudders. And the bad thing is that it does all these things at once, in the same roaring breath. You were sick in the interIsland ferry one night, but you must have been fooling yourself was never like this. You hang on for your life (your very life) ; and in the first few minutes the whole train is completely wrecked, hundreds killed, when this engine (i) jumps off the line ; (2) runs into a cliff; (3) smashes into a small station; (4) can’t get round a curve ; (5) blows up ; (6)

leaps over the side of a bridge into a river ; (7) shakes itself to pieces ; and (8) can’t get into a tunnel because the entrance is too small. In the first minute you think that engine is out of control. After the second minute you’re certain. And you wonder, too, why the driver sits there so unconcerned, indifferent apparently to the danger and the narrowness of the escapes—what’s the use of blowing the whistle at this stageand the fireman only makes matters worse by heaping on more coals. In an aeroplane you have a parachute, in a ship a lifebelt ; in the engine of an express you have nothing but the small consolation that when something happens you’ll be the first to know about it. Yes, for the first few miles, if it’s the first time, a journey in an engine is at least alarming. There is none of the smoothness of a journey

in a carriage seat, none of even that cramped comfort. In your seat, waiting for the long night to pass, you wonder sometimes at the dawdling speed ; in the engine you wonder that anything on rails can move so fast. You ask the driver just what the speed is. Thirty-eight miles an hour. More like one hundred and thirty-eight, you’d been thinking. For them, forty miles an hour is a good average ; up steep grades it is less ; along straight level stretches it rises to almost sixty. The noise, that roar of fire and steam and moving wheels, is terrific; it is a nuisance, too, because there is so much you want to ask the driver and his mate. You yell, from a foot away he yells back, but it’s not much use. It’s only on the down grades, when the steam is turned off, that it is quiet enough to find out the things you want to know. And then only with difficulty. “ A man wouldn’t have to be in the front like this if he’d known as much then as he does now.” The driver is telling you, yelling, that it was in 1900

that he first came to this part of that country. The railway-line wasn’t through then ; the land could be bought for £1 an acre or less ; now it is worth anything up to £SO an acre. For forty years he’s been with the Railways Department—his first responsibility was as a cleaner with a piece of cotton waste ; now he’s an express driver, this engine in his care and (apparently) his control. He knows every piece of its mechanism. He knows also every inch of the line, each curve where speed has to be slackened, each stretch of straight where it’s safe to open up. To him it doesn’t matter that the night is black, that visibility is almost nil with rain or fog. It’s a nuisance, but he could take that train through with his eyes shut. He knows the history of that countryside, too. People rushing through the night associate the stopping stations with coffee and a pie, a place to buy a magazine, a bottle of orange. The smaller stations, where the train does not stop, pass unnoticed. But the driver knows that this small town was the first in New Zealand to have electric light, that the next has signs of oil, that here the Maoris killed all the whites one dark night of war, that there a worldfamous scientist was born. You wish that it was quieter, so that you didn’t

have to miss so many of the things he has to say. A light through the trees, half a mile away. A blast on the whistle. The light blinks off, then on again. | The driver grins. It’s his daughter’s place and he’s saying good evening to her. So on you go through the ling good evening to her. of So on you go through the night, the powerful light of the engine slicing dramatically | through the blackness. Dark outlines of hills rise shadowingly by your side ; you see snow. Then they are gone. You pass through the towns, the centres that you know— Feilding, Ohakune, Frankton Junction, Palmerston North. But there are names you haven’t seen —Wiri, Porootaroa, Oio, Dinwoodie, Mangaonoho. For all you know they could have been the names of the main towns of Central Australia or Mexico or Tibet. You find you don’t know so much about this country called New Zealand. It’s dawn, the morning light is chill. The fireman swings giant shovels of coal into the giant furnace, tidily sweeps up the floor with his little red brush. At the next station the driver and he will leave this engine, to switch over to the cab of a south-bound express. You will go back to your seat. After twenty years you decide that after all you don’t want to be an engine-driver—and not only because your face gets so black from the soot and the smoke in the tunnels. You say good-night, you liked these two, the driver and his mate. In the carriage washroom you clean your face, your hands, as best you can. Thankfully you lie back in your seat. It seems so comfortable. You go to sleep wondering why engine-drivers wear white ties. It seems right enough for Fred Astaire to wear a white tie. But why enginedrivers ? You asked, but there was too much noise to hear the answer. You wonder . . but you’re asleep.