The Train Crept Around the Bend
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UPFRONT month when the Overlander made its last study of Dickens, the Waikato Times. More ever return journey in a day. Waiting for the tea? Yes, why not? Rail is a tremendous indulgence. To ride it to Hamilton and back KIWIRAIL RAN TWO trains between Auckland Overlander on the in the same day was a tremendous piece of and Wellington. One went south, one went platform at empty, luck. The mornings were bright and full of north. No longer. Now there is only one, and abandoned Frankton promise; the afternoons were as tender as it will head south one day, north the next, autumn. Waiting for the Overlander on the south the day after, etc. The new service was an exquisite platform at empty, abandoned Frankton has a new name — the Northern Explorer. melancholy — the was an exquisite melancholy — the silence It debuts on June 25, and passengers will and stillness, the fading light in the sky, be seated in new, purpose-built carriages. silence and stillness, the the suggestion of a lonesome whistle as I hope it has the same staff. I hope Jim is fading light... the train crept around the bend. onboard, and Mark, a cheerful Sri Lankan, It always arrived stealthily. One afternoon 30 years old, who joined Kiwirail after 200 metres above the Wanganui River. He I sat in sunshine on the other side of the working as a manager at Burger King in built roads. “Built that one,” he’d say, as the platform, and nearly missed it — the train Botany. He has a twin brother, a Japanese train went past Papakura. “Built that one,” was already about to leave the station, softly girlfriend, and hopes to set up an online he’d say, as the train went past Manurewa. departing in slippered feet. shopping service in Sri Lanka and Thailand. But he had a range of conversation. He There were scarecrows dressed in black He also has boundless energy and a very talked about being sentenced to 27 months rags in fields, fish in black pools in the nice smile. Like Jim, he genuinely cares in borstal in Invercargill when he was wetlands, and one morning there were about his passengers. 15 — he’d been with a friend who knifed two men digging a grave halfway up the They, the passengers, were mostly old, someone. Another day, he talked about how hillside cemetery on Taupiri mountain. muttering New Zealanders, old, timid to kill a turkey. Get an onion. Peel the top And there was always either Jim, or Mark, Englanders, old, large Americans and off it. Put it on the end of a long stick. Go or Simone, the Overlander’s camp mother young, intense Germans. They rode the into the bush, and hold it beneath a turkey — she kept her eye on everyone, looked train all the way to Wellington. They were asleep up in a tree. Wait for the fumes to after old and young. She lives in a beautiful on holiday, they had nothing to do. rise up and render the bird unconscious; wooden house built for a former headmaster There was one other commuter, one other it will fall off its perch onto the ground of King’s College; her mum lives there, too. worker — David, who got on the Overlander with a thud, whence you can pick it up and Simone takes care of her. Maybe I’ll get to every Monday at Middlemore station. He break its neck. see her again on June 25. All aboard on travelled to Taumarunui, where he was He sat back on the train and read thrillers. the Northern Explorer, leaving Britomart a kind of anxious and screeching goose. picked up by car and taken to his worksite I sat back and read Kipps by H.G. Wells, a station — the point of no return. And then the Waikato lowlands, with the Waikato River as fresh as paint, its wide, ponderous waters brushing up against Mercer, Rangiriri, Huntly, Taupiri and Ngaruawahia. And all the while, the noise and heavy STEVE BRAUNIAS metal of train on track. In a car or a bus you BRAUNIASLAND are pinned to your seat; a train is liquid, mobile, a moving feast of tea and Anzac biscuits from the buffet counter. The door THE TRAIN handles are low to the ground. There is an A farewell to one of our most romantic rail journeys. outside viewing platform, all the better to study the morning light taking shape WELL, JIM, I SAID, how are you? We from the job in 2011. I started again in late in the sky. shook hands. It was very good to see him summer. Really, the thing I looked forward And then Hamilton, the train pulling in again. We stood on the platform besides to most was travelling on the Overlander. at Frankton station, watched by James, a the Overlander train at Auckland’s The train left Britomart at 7.25am. It small, quiet man on a bicycle. He carried underground Britomart station on a arrived at Hamilton’s Frankton station a notebook, and his head was a maze of Monday morning in late summer. A big at 9.50am. Two hours and 25 minutes timetables. Maori from Northland, kindly, graceful of sunlight and water, dreaminess and I’d step off the train, cross the tracks on in his movements, he is 68 years old and loveliness — Mondays became the best the other side of the platform, and squeeze has worked on the railways for 48 years; day of the week. I adored every second of through a gap in the wire fence separating he started as a porter, then in the shunting the journey. Every second was so scenic, the station from the Frankton shops. There yards, where calves were taken in two-tiered especially in South Auckland. The factories, was a big Maori busker who played slow wooden carriages to the freezing works. As the warm homes, the faces in kitchen blues. There were four barbershops. I’d an attendant on the Overlander, he handles windows — also, two sheep in a small back buy a takeaway cup of miso soup from the luggage, cups of tea and passengers, all with yard in Otahuhu, and a bright red soccer health food shop, and wait at the rank for a lightness of touch. He has every intention ball on the tracks near Papatoetoe. Swan a taxi. Wintec was up and over a hill. The of reaching 50 years of service in July 2014. plants grow wild along a bank in Manurewa, day would go by, and then I’d make my way The last time I’d seen him, his arm was and there is a renegade cactus plantation back to the station, and wait to do the trip heavily bandaged. He’d tripped over his dog in Penrose. in reverse — the noise and heavy metal of and landed in the burning pit of a hangi. And then the bountiful Eden of Franklin train on track, the two hours and 25 minutes That was two years ago. Back then, I took County, with its crops and its tilled brown of sunlight and water… the Overlander to commute to Hamilton, fields, and its great flaps of starlings — I rode it to Hamilton and back every TTA HARRIS TTA where I performed various light duties one the air and dirt also move with magpies, Monday in March and April. It was as magic E day a week as a kind of tutor of journalism white-faced herons, harriers, goldfinches, as a spell, it was a thing of beauty, it was RI EN at Wintec polytechnic. I took a sabbatical greenfinches and the spur-winged plover, too good to last. The spell got broken last H 20 june 2012.