Wish more trains, even steamless ones would conduct sinuous passages out Hurstbridge way, Max. Still a single line and no new trains offered in the latest 'upgrade'; in fact fewer run from the city all the way out here.
Were you not allowed to byo pillow on the overnight? I took one on the Spirit of Tasmania ferry, knowing the lumps of lard offered on a previous trip.
Speaking of 'stifling darkness of smoky tunnels', on our recent trip, the TGV rattled along at near 300 kph with lights blazing even in bright mid-afternoon but as soon as you hit a tunnel, out went all the lights. A smokeless experience these days at least.
Bill
On 14/11/2012, at 4:24 PM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Old travel snaps
>
> If travel must be postponed,
> one may fall back on travel film
> and photographs, recent or old.
>
> These have the shadowy virtue
> of perspective in time -
> last year's sharp bright pictures,
>
> last decade's perhaps yellowing,
> last century's fading merely,
> remotest the sepias of beyond…
>
> The trains I took as a child
> steamed out of sight
> long since, though rail
>
> (unpatronised except for goods)
> still links those towns,
> conducting still its sedate
>
> courtship with the sinuous
> motorways. These old
> NZR publicity snaps
>
> bring back the stifling
> darkness of smoky tunnels,
> dry sandwiches, thick crockery.
>
> Conscripts I travelled with
> waited for the high viaducts
> to hurl into the bush despised
>
> plates and saucers. A shllling
> for a pillow at the platform
> before boarding the Overnight!
>
> The spacey feeling adrift
> in the morning at Wellington
> Station, looking up at the
>
> big bronze statuary -
> ideal Maori nobility,
> bare chest and breasts brassy.
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