by Haynes, Jim
Stargazer was so relieved that the cat hadn’t met a fiery fate that he was struck dumb for a minute. In that time, while the Catman waited for a reply, Stargazer at last realised that he’d been had. Then he remembered Paul’s win in the amateur hour and the penny dropped—and he started laughing in the poor bloke’s face. He was lucky the bloke didn’t clock him one.
Stargazer finally gathered his scattered wits and assured the man that he was laughing with relief. ‘You mustn’t have had the bag tied tight enough, mate,’ he lied. ‘The cat escaped near Coniston. I’ve been really worried about it—’ He finally managed to placate the bloke by promising to give him his five bob back or take the cat on another trip.
THE END OF THE LINE
By 1860, Sydney’s population had expanded to the point where a general cemetery was needed. Some 80 hectares were gazetted for the purpose in an area that was then beyond the existing suburbs, near Harlem’s Creek Station on the railway line to Parramatta. This became Rookwood Cemetery.
A branch line into the centre of the cemetery was completed at the end of 1864, and funeral trains ran regularly from 1867. Leaving from the old Sydney Station twice a day at 9.15 a.m. and 3.00 p.m., the funeral trains stopped just short of Harlem’s Creek Station and backed along the branch line to the two cemetery platforms.
Having funerals operate from normal railway platforms at Sydney Central soon proved unsuitable. Funeral groups were forced to mix with commuters and a place was also needed to store coffins that arrived by train from the outer areas, so, in 1869, the colonial architect James Barnet designed two church-like sandstone buildings, one at the Sydney end (which became known as the Mortuary Station) and the other at the cemetery.
The sandstone building at the cemetery end was 38 metres by 16 metres and the arch was 17 metres high. The trains backed right in and coffins were unloaded inside the building, which was decorated with angels holding scrolls and trumpets, to represent Judgement and Resurrection.
In the early twentieth century, funeral trains were made up of six of the most basic carriages in operation at the time. Between Mortuary Station and Rookwood, they could be flagged down at any station to pick up coffins and funeral groups. At Homebush, there was a long stop for ticket collection from the living passengers; coming back, the trains again stopped at Homebush for tickets to be checked and to make a list of where people needed the train to stop on its journey back to Sydney.
The coffin carriage could hold up to thirty coffins and the passengers, first- and second-class, rode in the front of the train accompanied by the undertakers.
The trains also picked up at some of the stations on the way. When they reached Rookwood, people would take their dear departed to where the freshly dug graves were waiting.
The length of the graveside eulogy depended on how far the grave was from the station because the train ran to a strict timetable and it took time to get the coffins to the more distant parts of the cemetery. So, the further away the grave was, the shorter the service had to be. Plots near the station were more expensive.
There is a story that one day, an old lady’s coffin had been placed in the train when her daughter approached the undertaker. She explained that her mum had always wanted her to have her rings as a keepsake, but when they laid her out they had forgotten to remove them.
The undertaker told the daughter not to worry and, when he had seen that all the mourners were aboard, he hopped into the coffin car with a screwdriver. By the time the train reached the cemetery, he had retrieved the rings and nobody was any the wiser. The daughter was very grateful. Even though everyone was sworn to secrecy, the word soon got around and that undertaker became a minor celebrity in his profession because he was the only person ever to ride in the coffin carriage of a funeral train with a return ticket!
In April 1948, the last funeral train ran and the branch line was closed. Motor vehicles had made the service unnecessary and a new road was planned which cut the branch line and made it impractical to operate.
In 1957, the building at the Rookwood end was purchased by the Anglican Church for the grand sum of £100 and moved stone by stone to Canberra. It still stands as All Saints Church of England, in the suburb of Ainslie.
Mortuary Station still stands today between Central and Redfern stations, which is quite close to the site of old Sydney Station near Regent and Devonshire streets.
JH
SAVED BY A CIGARETTE
RUSSELL HANNAH/JIM HAYNES
The commuter train that left Mount Victoria in the heart of the Blue Mountains at 6.09 a.m. every weekday morning was christened the Slogger by some of the passengers who travelled on it regularly from the mountains. It was due into Central at 8.32 a.m. and, consistent with its name, it generally delivered its human cargo fairly close to time. Just a handful started the trip at Mount Victoria but, after stopping at almost all the stations in the mountains, its passenger complement was often swollen to well over 600, many of them standing, by the time it left Parramatta.
It was no fancy train, just an old workhorse of eight wooden carriages, close to retirement, hauled by an electric loco. Certainly not the sort of train you’d expect people to be talking about for years to come. Yet, on Tuesday 18 January 1977, at 8.13 a.m., the Slogger tragically crashed its way into history.
You see, the Slogger was the train involved in the nation’s worst ever railway accident, and the second worst peacetime disaster on Australian soil—what Australians call the Granville Disaster.
A couple of kilometres east of Parramatta, Bold Street crosses the main railway line at Granville. Two concrete-buttressed steel trestles supported the Bold Street Bridge, each with eight steel stanchions. Just prior to passing under the bridge from the west, the railway line takes a long left-hand curve and passes over a set of points. Evidently, the line’s gauge had widened as a result of pressure from the heavy traffic; some of the dog spikes were badly worn.
As the Slogger rounded the curve and crossed over the points, the engine left the rails, began to rock and roll sideways and hit the trestles of the bridge, taking out eight of the sixteen steel stanchions.
As it did this, the engine also hit a steel mast that was holding the overhead electric wires and broke it off at the base. The mast swung out like a great sword and sliced the top off the first carriage. For a full twenty seconds, it seemed that the worst was over. Then the unimaginable happened. The bridge began to sag and 255 tonnes of concrete crashed into the old wooden carriages of the train.
It was the worst rail disaster in our history. The final count was 83 killed and 213 injured.
Bob Brain survived the disaster by remarkable chance circumstances.
Every morning he’d catch the bus from his West Guildford home to Parramatta Station and then take the train to Central. He often travelled with his friend Chris, who caught the same bus and train.
The Slogger was Bob’s preferred train because, after Parramatta, it stopped only once, at Strathfield, which made it the quickest way of getting to work. As the third carriage stopped near the entrance to the platform, it was the one he always travelled in.
The morning of Tuesday 18 January 1977 began like any other for Bob. The only difference was that his mate Chris had had a bit of a stressful morning and hadn’t had time for his morning cigarette. ‘What about we get on the first carriage for a change?’ Chris suggested, desperate for a smoke. Smoking was permitted in car one, but not in car three of the Slogger.
Bob agreed and they made their way to the front car. As the train was pretty full, they didn’t manage to get a seat, so both stood at the rear of the car and Chris managed to light up his smoke. This change to their routine not only meant they weren’t in the carriage that suffered the most fatalities—car three—but also, by chance, they were standing in what was to be the ‘safest’ end of the first carriage.
Bob recollects hearing the bang as the train left the rails. He remembers the carriage rocking to the left about thirty degrees t
hen rocking to the right at about the same angle. At this point he recalls falling onto the floor and having Chris fall over on top of him.
The accountant’s next memory is of waking on a stretcher beside the line with an ambulance man wiping blood from his face. His mate Chris was there as well. Bob’s main concern was for his briefcase and the work papers he had in it—he kept asking Chris to go back and see if he could find it.
A cigarette saved Bob Brain’s life. When he got out of hospital, the first thing he did was to buy Chris the largest carton of cigarettes he could find.
Strangely enough, Bob has since discovered that he is allergic to cigarette smoke—and he’s eternally grateful that he didn’t know about his allergy before that Tuesday in January 1977.
UNCLE ALEX MEETS TIMETABLE SCOTTIE
ALEX HOOD/JIM HAYNES
My Great Uncle Alex had a very short career on the railways but he always travelled on trains without a ticket.
It started when he met a girl from Perth when she was visiting Sydney and reckoned he’d follow her back when she went home. Great Uncle Alex always was a bit of a romantic. He scrounged around and got the train fare to Perth, then wrote to this girl and told her he was coming and asked her if she could meet him at the station.
Well, she met him at the station all right but she had a bloke with her. Evidently she said, ‘Hello Alex; this is my fiancé, Bill.’
Great Uncle Alex was a pretty perceptive bloke. He was quick to get the hint that perhaps he shouldn’t hang around. But anyway, there he was, stuck in Perth with no money and with nowhere to live. So, he did the only reasonable thing a young bloke could do in those days. He joined the railway.
There was always plenty of work on the railways in those days, but most of it was out in the bush, and that’s where they sent Great Uncle Alex. They gave him a rail pass to Northcliffe, a few hundred kilometres south-west of Perth.
Uncle Alex thought the job would be a featherbed ’cos there were only two or three trains a week, but he was in for a shock. Apart from the summer heat and the flies, he had to lay sleepers by hand, with only a sledgehammer and a crowbar. To top it off, the ganger was a real bastard and when he kicked my uncle up the arse after a fortnight in the job, Uncle Alex jobbed him and then, of course, he had to leave the job.
He had to get back to Perth so he could get back to Sydney, so he got to the marshalling yards in Bunbury. It was night, and he was looking for a goods train that might be going to Perth. One of the problems with jumping rattlers was that you didn’t know where the hell they were going.
Anyway, there he was, looking for a likely train, when he heard a voice say, ‘Get your head down, ya mug, or someone’ll see ya.’
Uncle looked around and couldn’t see where the voice was coming from. ‘Get down, ya mug,’ the voice hissed again, ‘or you’ll cruel it for me as well.’
‘Where are you?’ whispered my Uncle Alex, as loud as he dared.
‘Over here in the fruit wagon—where are you going?’ says the voice.
‘Perth!’ said Uncle Alex.
‘Well, that’s where this train’s going in fifteen minutes. Jump in here with me, but keep your bloody head down,’ said the disembodied voice.
So, Great Uncle Alex climbed into that fruit wagon and that’s how he met one of the most famous travellers in Australian railway history, Timetable Scottie.
Timetable Scottie knew everything about everything on the Australian railways. He knew where you could expect to find every loco; he knew how long it took to travel between stations. He knew when was the best time, and best place to get on and off goods trains. Best of all, he knew exactly where every train—passenger or goods—was going and what time it would arrive, allowing for lateness of course.
He was an amazing man. Every railway department in the country should have paid him thousands of dollars and got him to organise their timetables. Trouble was, they could never find him. He’d never paid a fare in his life and reckoned he’d travelled on every line in the country.
By the time that goods train reached Perth, Great Uncle Alex knew more tricks about rail travel than any other bloke in the country. Timetable Scottie was indirectly responsible for Great Uncle Alex becoming the wealthy man he is today.
It happened like this.
Months later, Great Uncle Alex was doing it tough—no money, no job and stuck in Hay. The temperature over a century every day and flies in plague proportions. Great Uncle Alex wanted to head for the coast, but he had no money for a fare. That’s when he used a trick that Timetable Scottie had taught him.
He went down to the station and told the stationmaster he was looking for a job on the railways. In those days, there was plenty of work on the railways but everyone had to do a written test. The stationmaster explained that Uncle Alex would have to go to Sydney to do the test. So, the stationmaster wrote him out a rail warrant, and off went Uncle in style.
When he got to Sydney, he did the test and he went pretty well in it. Great Uncle Alex was no dill. The last part of the test was for colour blindness. You can’t get a job on the railways if you’re colourblind, for obvious reasons. Every time they put a card in front of Uncle Alex and asked him what he saw, he said he saw brown dots. No matter what colour they flashed before him, all he saw was brown dots.
So they asked Uncle Alex to wait outside, and, a few minutes later, one of the examiners came out and told him that, even though he’d done exceptionally well in the test, they were unable to employ him ’cos he was colourblind. Uncle Alex pretended to be devastated and bunged on a blue.
He put on such a turn that they offered him a rail warrant to anywhere that he wanted to go in New South Wales, just to quieten him down.
Uncle Alex thought the north coast sounded a nice spot to spend the summer, so he got a ticket to Murwillumbah, the end of the line north.
He took the old North Coast Mail and got a job on a banana plantation. Then he courted the owner’s daughter and married her. When the old fellow died, he inherited the plantation. Now he owns six or seven plantations. He’s on the local council and he’s the biggest banana grower on the Tweed, all because he met Timetable Scottie.
If he hadn’t got that free ticket to Murwillumbah, his life would have been far different. He may still be jumping goods trains, just like Timetable Scottie.
HIT FOR SIX
JIM HAYNES
It was in a little western town,
The day was clear and fine,
And we were playing cricket
Down near the railway line.
The bowler sent a loose one down,
He couldn’t stand the strain;
I opened up me shoulders
And it landed in the train.
The driver blew the whistle,
Well, he hadn’t seen the ball.
I stared across at square leg
And I waited for the call.
It had the umpires puzzled,
It had ’em in a fix.
See, they found the ball in Broken Hill
But they only gave me ‘six’!
THE NEVER-NEVER RAILWAY LINE
The Northern Territory is renowned for its characters. Territorians reckon they are more ‘Australian’ than the rest of Australia. So, when it comes to trains, it’s no surprise to find that Territory trains have always had their own uniquely ‘Territorian’, and very Australian, character.
The most famous Territory train is, of course, the Ghan, although the old Ghan was technically a South Australian train, running as it did from Port Augusta to Alice Springs. It first ran in 1878, but the line didn’t extend to Alice Springs until 1929. When it stopped running in 1980, it was the source of a thousand wonderful yarns and legends. The new Ghan is part of the national rail system and now links Adelaide to Darwin.
The Northern Territory’s ‘other’ train was the one that ran from Darwin down to Pine Creek. As you would expect, this train also had a unique Territory character. In We of the Never-Neve
r, Jeannie Gunn described it as ‘a delightful train—just a simple-hearted, chivalrous, weather-beaten old bush-whacker, at the service of the entire Territory’.
Her account of her very first journey on the train is one of the highlights of that famous book. She likened the train to a large, friendly prehistoric creature:
There were no fences to shut us in; and as the train zigzagged through jungle and forest and river-valley—stopping now and then to drink deeply at magnificent rivers ablaze with water-lilies—it almost seemed as though it were some kindly Mammoth creature, wandering at will through the bush . . .
Other accounts of travelling from Darwin on ‘the Never-Never Line’ seem to suggest that the train was not, perhaps, as tame a creature as Jeannie Gunn would have us believe.
The Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway Bill was passed in 1883 and the line opened in 1888. Thousands of Chinese and Indians provided the labour.
The line was built to take freight but rarely ran at a profit. The gold rush ended, the cattle industry was struggling, cattle stations were too far from the railway line and the wet season meant derailments and washaways. To top it all off, termites ate the sleepers and, in 1897, a cyclone caused massive damage that virtually closed the line for two years.
In 1912, Darwin’s non-Aboriginal population was only 3310, made up of 1418 Europeans, 1331 Chinese, 280 Aborigines of mixed race and 281 ‘others’—so the railway wasn’t exactly busy.
At the end of World War I, work began on extending the line to Emungalen, on the banks of the Katherine River. This was so that Vesteys could get their cattle to the Darwin meatworks. As labour was short, Greeks, Russians and even Patagonian migrants were brought in. Many settled in the Territory to add to the melting pot.
The wildness of railway gangs in Katherine was legendary. One gang of thieves, rumoured to be railway workers, built a spur track into the bush, removed the goods in two vans, set the vans alight and covered their tracks by removing the rails.