14 January
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They
bred them tough in the old days! I came across this
story from a ganger (track maintenance worker) on
the railway in far northern Australia, in the
tropics:
"When
I was a ganger, I was going along the Darwin line on
my trolley on a Saturday, and I did a piston in. So
I fixed it to run on one piston. When I got to
Adelaide River, I borrowed another piston to help me
get home. But it was out of alignment, and I didn't
find out until it threw me. Off we went into the
rocks and sand, the motor and me. So I got a long
stick and a big stone and levered her back on the
line, and off we went again.
"Got
to Pine Creek, and we're going up the grade and hit
a kangaroo. He catapulted up into the air. I saw
that. I don't know what I did. When I came to, I saw
the trolley upside down at the side of the track. I
tried to heave myself off my face, but it seemed to
me that my collar bone was out of joint. I lay still
for a while, but I knew I'd better do something,
because no one was likely to come along. So I gave a
mighty heave to get me off my face.
"When
I came to again, I was on my back, and my collar
bone seemed to be in its proper place once again, so
I got up and walked a bit to where a gang had been
working and had a drink from their water bag hanging
in a tree. Then I went to sleep beside the track for
the night. In the morning, I got the telephone
working - this was hard to do because by now my ribs
were aching, and the bruises were getting sore, and
my head ached, and the telephone line had to be
unscrewed and telescoped up to contact the overhead
wires. By the time I got through and help came down
to get the trolley, it was time to go to work on
Monday morning.
"So I
went."
I was in that area a couple of months ago, but I was
travelling in an air-conditioned car. It was early
Spring, about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, about 85%
Relative Humidity, and the ground burnt the feet.
Adelaide River is now a small settlement; it would
have been even smaller back then - and there are
still crocodiles in the river. Pine Creek is a
couple of hours further inland to the south by the
modern road - it's another small settlement.
Conditions in the 1950s, when the guy telling the
story was working in the area, would have been much
more primitive.
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Railways in the arts
Books,
Plays, Films:
-
The Great
Railway Bazaar - Paul Theroux (travel
story).
-
Kingdom by
the Sea - Paul Theroux (travel story).
-
The Great
Train Robbery - Michael Crichton (Cape,
1975/Panther, 1976. This was later made into a
film).
-
Anorak of
Fire (BBC).
-
Fairy Tale -
A True Story - The Keighley & Worth Valley
Railway was the location for all the railway
scenes in the film.
-
From a
Railway Carriage - Robert Louis Stevenson
(poem).
-
Adlestrop
- Edward Thomas (poem).
-
The Bridge
Over the Silv'ry Tay - William McGonigal
(poem).
-
Brief
Encounter - Noel Coward (play).
-
Starlight
Express.
-
Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat - T.S.
Elliot (poem) (later set to music by Andrew
Lloyd Webber in Cats).
-
Ghost Train
- Arnold Ridley (play, later made into a
film).
-
Train Wreck -
Jeremiah Jack (Manor, 1975).
-
Imperial
Express - James Bellah (Jove, 1982).
-
The Man on
the Train - W.J. Chaput
(Worldwide/Harlequin, 1988).
-
Chaos -
William K. Wells (Doherty, 1987).
-
The Great
Railway Adventure - Christopher Portway
(Coronet, 1983).
-
The Great
Railway Bazaar - Paul Theroux (Hamilton,
1975/Penguin, 1977).
-
Von Ryan's
Express - David Westheimer (Pan, 1965.
Later made into a film).
-
The Green
Train - Herbert Lieberman (Arrow, 1987).
-
A-Train
- Roger Williams (W.H. Allen, 1985. About a
British train, carrying nuclear waste, which
is sabotaged).
-
Electric
Train - David Beaty (Coronet, 1977).
-
Transcontinental - Gary McCarthy (PaperJacks,
1987).
-
Train to
Hell - Alexei Sayle (Methuen,
1984/Mandarin, 1991 A comedy/mystery about a
British football special to Italy for the
World Cup).
-
The
Railway-Lover's Companion - Ed. Bryan
Morgan (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963, includes 29
verse items and 8 items of fictional prose -
all railway-related).
-
The thriller
The Magnet had a long sequence filmed on
the Liverpool Overhead Railway not long before
it closed.
-
Some years ago
there was a series on children's BBC called
God's Wonderful Railway, set on the Severn
Valley Line. The early episodes were set
mostly at Highley, the later ones at Arley.
-
La Bete
Humaine - a French novel by Emile Zola
first published in 1890. There is an English
translation in the Penguin Classics series. It
is a good account of the operation of the
Paris to Le Havre line in the 1870s, woven
into an account of sexual infidelity and
murder. It has been made into a film three
times: in 1938 under the original title; in
1954 as Human Desire (transposed to
contemporary US locations); and the 1995
TV-movie called Cruel Train (transposed
to WW2-era Britain).
-
The BBC
produced a play in the mid-1980s called
Song of Experience. Set in West Yorkshire
in 1960, it follows the exploits of three
young train spotters on a day out at the main
line station. These are a stereotypical mix of
"bad lad" (into rock 'n' roll, women and
"don't tell me mates what my hobby is"), "good
lad" ("should we be doing this lads?"), and a
stereotype (sickly child, wearing school
uniform -shorts, cap, satchel - who knew all
the shed allocations of by heart, etc). It was
filmed on the Keighley & Worth Valley and
Severn Valley lines for the train travel
scenes, and the filming was very realistically
done. A highly risqué
drama but a hugely enjoyable one.
-
Several
Sherlock Holmes stories (by Arthur Conan
Doyle) feature railways, including one where
Holmes estimates the speed of the train from
observing the telegraph poles.
-
In The
Bruce Partington Plans, the Metropolitan
Railway plays a significant part. Also, in
the final story of the third collection,
where Holmes escapes from London to the
Continent. It includes an account of a
railway chase.
-
Doyle's
Round the Fire stories include one
concerning the total disappearance of a
train and its illustrious occupant. That was
The Lost Special, which would have
been huge fun to make a film of. A short
special was hired at short notice in
Liverpool to go to London, and somewhere
along the route, it totally vanished.
Eventually, inspection of the signalmen's
logs isolated the section it had disappeared
in, but there were no junctions, only a
number of closed colliery branches with the
connecting track lifted. The dénouement was
years later in the form of a confession (the
film would have to change that). The baddies
knew a special was likely and had a gang of
men large enough to rush a piece of curved
track into place between trains. The special
was diverted down one of the disused
colliery lines, and the main line was then
immediately replaced. Accomplices on the
train tied the crew up and slowed the train
enough to jump off a few hundred yards from
a large shaft to which the track had been
moved. The entire train was swallowed up
with a tremendous crash, and that was that.
Nowadays, you'd have to tidy up a bit more
carefully than Conan Doyle did - what about
the marks on the branch rails ? And the
steam rising from the shaft?
-
There was
also the Seven-per-cent Solution, a
Sherlock Holmes novel written by Nicholas
Meyer. Included a train chase filmed on the
SVR.
-
Agatha Christie
also wrote stories featuring railways, the
most famous of all (indeed, perhaps the most
famous detective story of all time) being
Murder on the Orient Express, also a major
film.
-
Charles Dickens
often wrote stories including railway travel:
too many to list here.
-
Trainspotting - for having no trains in
it, apart from a sole SuperSprinter!
Music
inspired by railways:
-
The day we
caught the train (Ocean Colour Scene,
1996).
-
Long train
running (Doobie Brothers, 1973) Lots of
American locos in the video.
-
Something
about you (Level 42, 1985) which seems to
have been filmed in a Mk 1 coach.
-
Princess of
the Night by Saxon (heavy metal rock
group).
"She used to be
an iron horse
Twenty years ago
Used to bring the mail to me
Through the ice and snow
I sat alone and watched her
Steaming through the night
Ninety tons of thunder
Lighting up the sky
She was the princess of the night...... "
-
Chant des
chemins de fer (Railway Song) by Hector
Berlioz.
-
Vergnuegungszug (Excursion Train)
by Johann Strauss Jnr.
-
Rhapsody in
Blue by Gershwin was inspired by a train
ride.
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Pa | |
