WORKING ON THE RAILROAD

Memories of rail journeys past

TGV First Class interior.

           I’m writing this on the Atlantic coast of France, half a country away from Paris. Early this afternoon, however, I’ll board a TGV – train de grande vitesse/high speed train – at La Rochelle and, barring complications, alight four hours later at Gare Montparnasse. If past trips are an indication, the journey will be peaceful, comfortable and, by the standards of even other European rail systems, cheap; less than US$100, even in First Class, and, with a Seniors’ Concession, half that.

         I’m all the more impressed with France’s rail system since I am a lifelong railwayman. My first job when I left school was with the New South Wales Government Railways. I wish I could claim to have been a fireman, shoveling coal into the huge steam locomotives that ruled the rails back then, but, though I did spend my share of hours riding “dead head” on the footplate, my primary job was clerical.

            All this took place in a small town called Junee, in rural Australia, the only claim to fame of which was its position equidistant from the state capitals of Sydney and Melbourne, making it a convenient spot for engines to take on more coal and change personnel. Both took place in a huge brick roundhouse, next to which was the office where I worked. The building – and the office – have been preserved as a museum. You can see them in this little film.

https://roundhousemuseum.com.au/

           I hardly recognize the Roundhouse without the ever-present coal smoke and the crash and rattle of shunting engines and rolling stock. What I do remember is the town as shown in the film’s historical photographs; a throwback to pioneer times, with two-storey buildings, many of them hotels, and overhanging verandahs, to the supports of which men had once tied up their horses before heading inside for a few pints of gullet-numbing iced lager.

          Junee had a golf course, numerous tennis courts, a couple of football fields and an Olympic-sized swimming pool but no public library or bookshop. (Even today, it’s only public monument is the statue of a local lad who became famous as a commentator on rugby.) Joining the railways was my ticket out, and nobody was happier when, having served the obligtory two years’ probation, I could apply to be transferred elsewhere.

I spent many subsequent years bad-mouthing the town, and planning my triumphant return, ideally in a smart car with a beautiful and exotic woman at my side, making a victory lap of the community from which I'd been so eager to escape. When an influx of movie money and the presence of the French girl whom I later married provided the opportunity, I seized it. With her at my side in a crimson sports car - vanity plate MOVIE1, no less - I cruised down its main street.

           Though she tried to see it through my eyes, encrusted with the humiliations and frustrations of adolescence, my companion’s Gallic good sense prevailed.

           "Mais,” she said cautiously,” c'est mignon."

           Cute? How could it be cute? But surveying the wide avenues lined with pepper trees, the tin-roofed bungalows drowsing in the sun, the Edwardian buildings with their quaint verandahs…. I had to admit that time had worked its magic.

           So much for the stuff that dreams are made of.