I Drew This

I get the Belair line train into the city most mornings. I met a work colleague at the station this morning and we got in the train together and were having a nice chat about work stuff; boring but interesting.

The Adelaide public transport system, the rail network in particular, has a bit of a reputation. Most of the rail cars are getting old, they run on diesel, the windows are made of some dual-layer Perspex material that ranges from translucent at best to almost opaque at worst, the trains NEVER run on time (at least not on the Belair line but I gather most other lines are the same).

I don’t know what the problem was this morning but we noticed that as we pulled out of the station and got up a bit of speed, the engines cut out and we rolled into the next station before the brakes went on, passengers got on, the engines were started again, we got up some speed and they cut out again. The fortunate thing is that the Belair line, being the only train line into the hills, runs downhill going into the city, so saving power for whatever reason is pretty easy when gravity can do most of the work.

Even when things levelled out after Mitcham, the driver was still turning off the engines after getting up to full speed and we rolled into pretty much every station. It certainly made chatting easier, as the lack of engine noise made for a very quiet ride. My colleague and I were having to keep it down a bit at times because there was just so little noise and we didn’t want to seem loud.

The funny thing, and perhaps the point of this post, was that after we rolled into Goodwood, and just before the driver fired up the engines again, he made the same announcement that every driver makes just before leaving Goodwood on this particular train.

“Express to Adelaide”

It was one of those occasions where the unwritten rule of keeping to yourself could be disregarded. For some reason, the train was only half-full and that remark brought guffaws of laughter from me and a few other passengers. A guy sitting near me pulled out his earphones and asked “What did he say?” and he laughed when I told him.

Oh, we pulled into an unusual platform too (not that platform 4 is different in any way but this train usually comes into platform 1) and, such is the opacity of the windows, that people lined up to get out the doors on the wrong side of the carriage.