Through the Manawatū Gorge by Steam
Feilding to Woodville & Back, & Other Rail Tales
“In your dungarees, cleaning Super Ds,
You're a sweeper-upper, brewer-upper, shovel slinger, spanner bringer,
Steam raiser, fire dropper, general cook and bottle washer,
Learning how to keep 'em rolling…”1
A bright clear morning. Driving to Feilding as the sun climbs the sky. Ruapehu visible, a misty silhouette on the horizon. I see one falcon, then twenty minutes later, another, the second one so close overhead I can see the bars on her wing-feathers, the chocolate chips on her breast. “They’re obviously on the ascendant,” says Kev.
I see a road sign fringed with lichen, shaggy like seaweed at low tide; a long-legged colt, shaggy likewise; and a jacketed horse with its back legs splayed, scratching its butt on a power pole. I think of W. H. Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts:
“…the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
Kev: “A horse’s birthday is always on the first of January, regardless of when it was actually born. But maybe it’s the first of July in the Southern Hemisphere?”2
We have tickets for the steam train, the Manawatū Madness section of the journey, Feilding to Woodville through the Manawatū Gorge. We kept meaning to go on a steam train, then forgetting, but this time I was determined: the Gorge road has been closed since 2017 due to slips, so it’s an inaccessible bit of country these days.3 I’ve got a memory of riding the train through the Gorge once before, the way the road clings to the near-vertical hillside on the other side of the river. (How could this be? Passenger trains don’t generally run there— they haven’t since 2001— but I can see it, in my mind.)
We get to Feilding train station well ahead of time— the train’s late. More and more people arrive, until the platform is thronged. The old, the young, the in-between: we’re all waiting for an apparition of the past.
The girl ahead of me in the toilet queue examines me appraisingly. “Your hair’s very long.”
She looks about 9 or 10. I like her air of frank confidence.
Me: “Yes it is.”
Her: “There’s a girl in my ballet class who says she wants to grow her hair down to her ankles.”
Me: “Well… When it gets as long as mine, you accidentally sit on it; maybe if it got down to your ankles you’d accidentally stand on it.”
Her: “I think the reason she wants to grow her hair is to be like Abby. But if she really wanted to be like Abby, she’d have to dye it black.”
Everyone is standing on the very edge of the platform, over the yellow line, trying to see past each other down the tracks. There’s an atmosphere of excited anticipation; it feels like a crowd of fans waiting for a glimpse of a celebrity. A ripple runs through the crowd— it’s coming, it’s coming, a herd of wildebeest in the shape of a machine, and I sacrifice watching it with my eyes for the sake of a photo:
When we bought the tickets, the small print was like…
(might actually not be a steam engine though)
I guess they have to say that to cover their arses in case of tears and tantrums at the trackside and / or getting sued, but as you can see above, it was a steam engine, Ja1271.4 Steam engines undoubtedly possess magical powers— but why? Is it just the size and power of them?5 Is it the fact that they’re a beast made of numbers, and one can seek to know the numbers? Is it the simplicity of the technology— the alchemy of fire and water, coal and steel, transmuting into speed? (A steam engine is called an engine or a locomotive, plain descriptive words that describe a class of mechanical object and its function.) Is it (Kev’s theory) because you can see the engine working, you can see all the parts moving and how they fit together— “like a science teacher’s diagram”?
Is it the aesthetics, that were once the height of modernity, and are now pure vintage? (Kev: “They could give you a souvenir ticket made of paper when they scan your smartphone.”) Is it the way the engine breathes steam and soot visibly, like a living dragon? The spectacle that a train makes in motion? (Evidence of voodoo potency: the way that sheep, cows, and horses scatter away, kicking up their heels, as from something terrifying and unnatural; the way that humans wait at points along the designated route, just so they can watch the train go by. Pure joy of spectacle. They wave as we pass. Adults wave, as well as children, as if the train were alive, as if it were a friend.)
Me: “Is the mystique of trains to do with the fact they run on tracks?" Like, for instance, how that makes them predictable in time and space: you can go to a certain place at a certain time and the train will meet you there.
Kev: “Well— if you think about railways above and beyond trains themselves— it’s the infrastructure that’s the true Leviathan. The track networks cover the whole country in a big web.”
The people who sit down opposite us fill me with unease because the woman is so obviously unwell. She wears a mask and sits with her eyes closed, trying to sleep, squinching her eyes as if in pain, and putting her tiny hand over her face, resting her fingertips between her eyes.6 I want to get away from her and her unmasked boyfriend, so we make our way back to the observation car.
We step out into the smell of coal.
The first time I went to the South Island, I visited my sister in Greymouth. It was Winter. I was like “What’s that smell?”
Everyone stared at me. “It’s coal.”
Fucking JAFA! Me, innocently: “What’s a JAFA?”
Just Another Fucking Aucklander. I was shocked! Wounded! I genuinely didn’t know that most of New Zealand hated my kind— sweet Summer child! Had any of them ever actually been to Auckland? That wasn’t the point. If they had, they got out of there and never went back again. Then we went to the pub where everyone sang along to The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers, a song I didn’t know. You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em. (Incidentally, this song takes place on a train.)
Anyway, while we were riding the train this was the song going round and round in my head: When you’ve shovelled a million tons of coal some ten or twelve years later, And your only dream is of raising steam…
Kev: “A million tons of coal is probably an accurate figure. Say you’re a fireman for twelve years before you get promoted to driver.”
Me: “Well, MacColl’s lyrics are based on interviews, and I reckon engineers would probably give a precise number.”
There’s a kid on the train wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with the engine’s number— 1271— printed over his heart in white, and when he walks through I see that on the back of the shirt is a drawing he’s done of the engine, which is the cutest thing ever.
Another song on the mind’s-ear jukebox, this train-lullaby: When thou art grown tha shall have thy own engine, the biggest that ever was seen on the line.
The house I was born in was behind a train station. One of my earliest memories is of playing train driver, sitting in a cardboard box, using a pot lid to steer.7 My carriages were cardboard boxes in a row; my passengers were dolls and teddies, and eventually my baby sister. (Excite! A real human passenger!) At Playcentre,8 when I was 3 or 4, we would climb up on the wooden tower to wave at the trains going by. Then there was the tiny train that ran through the bush up by the Waitakere Dam.9 We’d go there for birthday parties or weekend excursions. The carriages were open-sided, and as the train went through the tunnels, which had been carved out of living rock, the walls and roof were hung with galaxies of blue glow-worms. We knew, too, that there were long-legged cave wētā all around, clinging to the wet stone, waving their freakishly long antennae. (I feared them.)
It’s this wee bush-train I think of as I stand on the viewing platform of the steam train, watching the foliage flying past. (It’s the open-sidedness that reminds me. Modern trains are hermetically sealed, like an aeroplane— you can’t even open a window.)
I think, too, about Shayne Carter’s friend Wayne who died. Shayne describes the incident in his great memoir, Dead People I Have Known.10 He and Wayne were smoking between carriages on the Northerner, the overnight train from Auckland to Wellington. (I also used to ride this train: it was the cheapest way to travel back in the 90s.) They were messing around, got down on the steps and leaned out, and Wayne hit the abutment of a bridge. Shayne was smacked into— which broke a couple of his ribs— but he somehow managed to hang on to the handrail, and was grabbed and dragged back to safety by another friend.
A few years ago I was given a free flight to Dunedin and found myself sitting next to Shayne on the plane. He was reading something literary (it wasn’t Proust, maybe Flaubert?) and we got yarning about books and writing. He said that the main thing when it comes to writing is not to give a fuck what anyone else thinks. When we landed at Dunedin he smoked rollies as we drove to his house, on top of a hill overlooking some windswept surf beach. I waited in the car while he went inside. I felt I’d stepped through a magic portal into a parallel world: Dunedin. He came back out with a copy of his book, which he gave to me. (I’d told him I wanted to read it, but couldn’t afford it.) Then we went to The Museum of Natural Mystery, my friend Bruce’s museum, where a group show was opening. We were late because the plane had been delayed, and Carter was received somewhat coolly: perceived inaccuracies in his memoir had pissed some people off.
The reason I got the free flights was that I was the only person who could turn on a dime and be ready to go with just a few hours notice. Kirsty, the person who’d given me the plane tickets, is a Shayne Carter mega-fan. She had given away her destined fate of sitting next to him along with the tickets, and Bruce and Loren and I all agreed that she must never know. Somehow she found out, though; someone must have spilled the beans.
We fly across the flat fields, the dull city, and then suddenly the hills steepen around us and we are entering the Gorge. The sun-struck river has the appearance of inanga:11
I like that the awa12 can pass its time lazy snaking through this private stretch, mostly unobserved. There’s a nice air of abandonment and dereliction about the deserted road on the far side of it, clinging to the cliffside like Meccano. As we penetrate into the interior I see that there are people standing on the other side, on the abandoned road. They’ve walked in to watch the train pass. Deep in the Gorge, I see two teenagers on bikes, pedalling along the road, racing the train.
Last night as I was falling asleep I wondered about that awa’s name. Manawa = heart; tū = ?? It turns out that tū is to stand still, so Manawatū means ‘heart standing still’.
The story goes “The great Manawatū River was named by an explorer named [Haupipi-a-Nanaia] who had travelled down the coast from Taranaki, chasing after his runaway wife and her lover. Hau had already crossed other big rivers, naming them as he went. Whanganui (meaning expansive mouth), he splashed through the waters of Whangaehu (cloudy waters), felling a tree to cross the Turakina (turaki - to throw down) river, he looked upon the Manawatū river with great apprehension. His heart stood still when he saw it because of its size and beauty and so it was named Manawatū River...”13
Railway, river, and road: three lines laid into the landscape, following each other’s contours closely but never touching. The railway and the road go both ways, there and back again; but the river runs one way only, Westward to the sea.
Wikipedia says: “The Manawatū is unique among New Zealand rivers in that it crosses a mountain range. The river has formed a ‘water gap’ across the mountains because it is older than the Ruahine and Tararua Ranges. Most rivers arise from an already-existing range of mountains or hills, but beginning about 3 million years ago the central North Island mountain ranges began to uplift across the Manawatū's current course. Because it drained a large catchment, the river had sufficient flow to keep pace with and erode the rising mountains, eventually forming the Manawatū Gorge; other rivers were unable to and were diverted into the Manawatū instead.”
A genial volunteer warns us not to go on the viewing carriage as we pass through the tunnels, unless we want a faceful of soot. Me, suddenly understanding: Ohhhhhh— the soot-plume is a cloud of bits, and if you pass through that cloud, it smuts you up. (As Peter Cape sang in possibly the greatest New Zealand train song:
”You can get to Taumarunui going North or going South,
And you pull in there at midnight with cinders in your mouth,
You’ve got cinders in your whiskers and a cinder in your eye,
So you pop off to Refreshments for a cuppa tea and pie…”)
Soon we’re out the other side of the Gorge, through Woodville and into the balloon loop— it’s a way for the train to change directions without having to shunt or stop— then after that, back in Woodville, where we all disembark. The only person I know who lives in Woodville is the legendary Maungarongo Te Kawa. (I looked him up to link to his work, and discovered from this recent interview that his Dad worked on the railways as a ganger, laying sleepers. As he mentions in the interview, he used to work the markets in Auckland— on the K Road overbridge, which was where I first met him. Later he had a tiny shop in Sandringham Road. I bought a floor-length upcycled skirt from him that I wore every day until it fell apart, and a blue-dyed shirt, likewise.)
The menfolk who attended to the engine reminded me of my Dad. It was their outfits: greasy blue overalls, the type of overalls Kev calls ‘the Worker’s Onesie’.
When I got my first car, a 1988 Nissan Sentra inherited from my Grandma, I was in my late 20s. (Not driving was another one of those stubborn contrarianisms with which I have made my life about ten times more difficult than necessary.) If you know cars, you’ll know that this car was a total shitbox. The first thing that went wrong was the head cracked. I had to fix it myself, with my Dad’s help, because I was poor. That was a baptism of fire: a head replacement is a three-day job. When we went to Pick-a-Part,14 the woman behind the counter asked me, “Do you want the man’s vest or the lady’s vest?” (It’s a rule that you have to wear a hi-vis vest on site.)
Me: “I dunno, what’s the difference?”
Lady: “This is the lady’s vest.” (Holds up a pristine, clean vest.)
”And this is the man’s one.” (Holds up a grease-stained, filthy black vest.)
Me: “Err… Give me the man’s one.”
My Dad is a skilled amateur mechanic. Like many New Zealand men over a certain age, he can pretty much fix anything. As we worked on the car together, I noticed that he seemed to regard the engine as a place, maybe a small village, where parts ‘lived’. My Dad’s phrase for improvising a part or solution: to Mickey [a thing] up. (I guess this is a reference to Mickey Mouse.) Another thing he frequently said was “I’m 90-plus percent certain that [X is the solution to problem Y].” To me, mechanicing was like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. You undid it, paying attention to the order, then you put it back together. I realised the the aura of arcane mystery that had seemed to shroud mechanical knowledge was basically just… well… my personal ignorance about something that turned out to be learnable and logical.
Then there was this magic moment at the end of the process— after three or four days of driving out for parts and supplies and lying on the cold concrete with oil dripping in your face— when you turn the key and the engine roars to life, and you feel like Doctor Frankenstein: IT LIVES.15 When I experienced that feeling, I understood for the first time what it means to re-animate a very old, very large engine like a Tiger Moth or a steam train, what a feat that is. It’s like being a necromancer: literally bringing what’s long-dead back to life. With an engine that’s 100 or 200 years old, you can’t just order the parts from Repco, either— a lot of the time they have to be made from scratch, and that kind of precision engineering is truly very cunning humaning, especially if you do it by pure number eight wire ingenuity, using greasy old machines in a shed.
So the dudes who were going around in greasy overalls, I felt quite fond of them. The interesting thing was that they weren’t all old. There were even a few beardless youths among them: one slight and dark, one round-faced and red-headed, with their faces all covered in smuts like Victorian urchins, jazzed and happy. I wanted to take a photo of them but I was too shy to ask. At the other end of things, I found out later that this outing was Sparky’s last trip as driver, after 50 years on the job.
Steam is definitely emotional, romantic, nostalgic: witness the cult of steampunk— a retrofuturism— a parallel historical trajectory imagined as much cooler than this one.
Kev: “Many Leftists love trains, but historically trains were associated with private enterprise.”
”Not in New Zealand.” I say. “They were all government-owned here— they’re a symbol of Socialism.”
(The railways were run by the New Zealand Railways Department from 1880 until the 1986, when they became a State-owned corporation, leading to massive job losses and cutbacks. This was under Rogernomics, the great sell-off of the country’s family silver to line the pockets of oligarchs.16 In 1993— as my friend Ali told me— New Zealand Rail was sold to an international consortium.17 In 2008, the Government bought the railways back: Kiwirail.)18
Anyway, a passenger train is Communist because it subsumes the specific needs of the individual into the group needs of the many (i.e. it takes hundreds of people roughly but not exactly where they need to go. Consider, too, that as well as carrying hundreds of passengers at a time, a train is a communally run enterprise: many workers make it go.) A car is Capitalist because it privileges the needs of the individual to the detriment of the group (i.e. a person can drive according to their personal desire from point A to point B. In theory a car can carry a maximum of four passengers as well as the driver, although if you watch a motorway, you will see that the majority of cars have only a single occupant).
Noted urban rail enthusiast and musician Anthonie Tonnon, who did a whole tour integrated with train travel, Rail Land, says: “What I don’t understand about our car-driven world is that 100 people driving cars is 100 people working; whereas 100 people on trains is one driver driving and 100 people being free to let their mind wander and do whatever they like.”
Kev: “Yeah, but a lot of people are still working while they’re on the train.” He means on the Capital Connection, the two-hour commuter train from Wellington to Palmerston North: the way it functions as a kind of secondary office space.
At least, though, there’s diverse company and an interesting view, and you can drink beer or wine at your ‘desk’. A long-distance train is homelike: it has food and toilets, and if you have to go across Siberia or something, there will generally be beds, too.
At Woodville Station there’s a sausage sizzle on the platform. We go to look at the engine, and by the time we get back, the queue is longer than a railway carriage, maybe one and a half carriages long. I’m not a big fan of Mad Butcher-type sausages anyway. We go inside the station, where we find two old ladies presiding over two big cauldrons of soup, and buy 2 X pea and ham soup in an Arcoroc mug, and 2 X buttered rolls. All the tables are full so I pull plastic chairs from a stack. It’s excellent soup. It tastes like farm cuisine, which always reminds me of my Aunties’ house. Hearty AF!
Another train-paradox concerns CARBON: At Woodville Station, the train was refilled with literal coal, six cube-shaped bags of it— much like big fadges, the bags you fill with garden waste— that came on the back of a truck and were loaded by the truck’s crane. The bulk bag was suspended by the crane over the top of the tender, a flap in the bottom was opened, and the anthracite came tumbling down, pushed along by a guy with a shovel. (The bunker— the chamber the coal goes into inside the tender— is sloped, so that the coal shakes down with the motion of the train, so that the fireman can always get a good shovelful.)
Anyway, it was these bags of coal sitting on the truck that made me think… Carbon. Literal carbon. Turned into that cloud of soot that pours out of the chimney. (Dark Satanic mills etc.) Coal has something of the vibe of 10,000 cigarettes being smoked at once. Mining is… bad, right? Again, though, there’s a tension between past and present: to the modern eye, coal is an antiquated fuel.19 (Where does this particular coal come from? Is it a special, bespoke kind? Is it local coal, hewed out of the ground by miners on the West Coast? Is it from Rotowaro? Or is it specially bought from a ‘heritage fuel’ company?)
When I was riding the bus yesterday, the woman in front of me was reading the Listener, and I could see a Chris Slane cartoon on the page: a steam engine marked ‘NZ’ going full-speed— but attached backwards to the train, and running off the edge of a cliff. I could see that Prime Minister Luxon was driving the train, but then she turned the page. Later I managed to find it on the Internet. There’s a sign beside the track saying ‘Fast Track’.20 The train is pulling a carriage marked ‘Polluters’ full of men in top hats with villainous moustaches. Shane Jones is perched on a heap of coal in the tender (which has NZF for New Zealand First on the side), waving a shovel and saying “Black is the new green!” Luxon, flanked by David Seymour and Nicola Willis, and also wearing a top hat (the classic cartoon emblem of a fat-cat) is going, “You’re right, backwards is way faster.”
(I notice though, that the cartoon engine itself is quite lovingly rendered; relics of a drawing-boy inside a drawing-man?)
Trains went from coal to diesel. Diesel is still a dirty fuel made of dinosaur-juice. However, now we have electric trains: undeniably less bad. In theory, a train could run on a battery charged by wind-power. Also, like I said, train travel is a good kind of Communism, and all in all trains are awesome, which is why there are groups passionate about restoring passenger rail for climate reasons; they’re the ones who glue their hands to motorways. I miss the days of the Overnighter, which has now become the bougie Northern Explorer: it costs over $200 one-way. Another cool thing would be a Wellington to Wanganui line. One can dream.
Manual labour— as glorified in folk songs— coal-mining, train-driving, etc., is another one of those paradoxical things. Is it filthy and brutal and poorly paid— or is it essentially noble, the hard-working backbone of the country? Or is it both? Should people be worked like machines? …But if they are, shouldn’t the power of that work be acknowledged?
There’s also the historical entanglement of trains and clocks to consider. It was the necessity of railway timetabling that spawned the near-universal tyranny of clock-time, as described in Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful 2003 book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Solnit: “Before the new technologies and ideas, time was a river in which human beings were immersed, moving steadily on the current, never faster than the speeds of nature — of currents, of wind, of muscles. Trains liberated them from the flow of the river, or isolated them from it…
Time itself had been of a different texture, a different pace, in the world Muybridge was born into [in 1830]. It had not yet become a scarce commodity to be measured out in ever smaller increments as clocks acquired second hands, as watches became more affordable mass-market commodities, as exacting schedules began to intrude into more and more activities.”
On the way back through the Gorge, the sun is low, the light glorious in my eyes, approaching golden hour. I kneel on the blue seat in the buffet car with my face pressed to the window, watching the landscape unfold itself. The wooden sash windows have a catch on each side: both have to be squeezed at the same time to lift the window. They’re a beautiful job of joinery, and they give me that old familiar feeling of things were more beautiful in the old days— by which I mean literal things, material design. I didn’t take a photo of the window, but here’s the door:
The air in the carriage is soporifically warm, syrupy with afternoon sun. The blue-overalled man in the far corner is asleep: they get up at four in the morning to get the train ready. I think about how probably in the old days, the carriages would have been full of cigarette smoke. We’ve been told not to stick things— arms, cameras, etc.— out the window, so I press my camera’s nose against the glass pane and wait for a leftward-curving section of track:
As we come to the edge of the Gorge, we see the new road under construction:
One advantage of writing over photography— and the reason I mostly leave my camera at home— is that observing directly privileges what Michael Pollan, in his book about psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, calls ‘lantern consciousness’ as opposed to ‘spotlight consciousness’.21 At any given time, I have to choose one or the other: Image-brain and Word-brain are two different brains. When I’m noticing to remember in order to write, my field of information is as large as my eyes, ears, nose, and skin can perceive: lantern consciousness.
Photography is spotlight consciousness, the world reduced to this one small rectangle. Reality is boiled down, intensified, by being limited in space and time simultaneously, boundaried by the edge of the potential image. Photography is like a time-puzzle, a game you get obsessed with trying to solve. It induces a pleasurable flow state, but bringing my camera on the train also caused me to notice how much I missed— experience sacrificed to the record. The bright light made exposures difficult to gauge, and the view from the window unfolded swiftly, in infinite kaleidoscope of new angles and iterations. I got good shots more by luck than by design. Looking back at my photos, it looks as if I was alone on the train: I’ve cropped out all the crowds of fellow passengers. I don’t much like to photograph people without their consent.
Back at Feilding we disembark. I hadn’t wanted to get the money shot, the shot everyone else was trying to get, but I can’t help myself. I go to the edge of the track. Minutes pass: they’re probably shovelling on more coal. Anticipation builds. Then the train blows out a massive cloud of steam that sends everyone scurrying onto the grass, which makes me think of a big white frilly petticoat— “Pure showmanship,” says Kev, leaning against a tree— then on it comes. Coal and steam, black and greasy, white and ephemeral, alchemy of fire and water in a belly of steel. Chug-chug. Chug-chug. You know the sound. The metal beast looms and I snap one photo, two, three, then: MEMORY CARD FULL, says my camera.
Ha! Its like a wedding, or a solar eclipse: one chance only. Luckily I’m not a photographer any more, so I’m not too bothered.
We walk back across town to the stadium, where we’d parked. Feilding smells like sheep. I’m all excited, chattering like a kid, asking questions about trains. It’s Saturday, so we decide to go to the Tok— Tokomaru RSA and Country Club— for a jug of Speights.22 As we cross the flatlands I catch sight of a plume of smoke in the distance. “Look,” I say to Kev, “Reckon that’s the train?”
”Probably just a farmer’s fire,” says Kev.
But when we get to Tokomaru, there is 1271. Hooray! What luck! Another bite of the apple! Another, faster train has to go past, so the steam train is idling in a loop. I jump out of the van and rush to the trackside.
After a few minutes, the modern train— headlamps blazing— passes the antique train. They blow their horns merrily at each other. Kev says that 1271 will have to wait until the other train has cleared Shannon station before entering the length of track. It’s definitely evening by now. I keep re-checking my exposure while I wait. I think my battery might run out, too, but it doesn’t:
Wooo-woooo! Kev is making a video on his phone. When I climb up the bank he is still filming. As the train recedes into the distance, he zooms in on it, the image becoming shaky.
The fire in the corner of the RSA is cranking. Glasses out of the fridge, beaded with condensation. I’m flipping through my photos, hoarded treasure. You smell like coal. And you have cinders on your face. By the time we get home, the galactic core of the Milky Way is directly over the house, a cave-roof of glow-worms, a starry mouth.
This train trip was run by Steam Incorporated: https://www.steaminc.org.nz/
Ewan MacColl, Song of the Iron Road
It’s actually the first of August, illogically.
CORRECTION: In a historic, catalytic decision, all horse’s birthdays are now the first of January!
The Green party want to run twice-daily passenger rail through the Gorge from Palmerston North to Napier, a route they propose to call the Ruahine Runner.
https://www.steaminc.org.nz/our-rail-fleet/steam-locomotives/ja1271/
In the year 1271:
Marco Polo sets off from Venice to meet Kublai Khan. (He doesn’t get there until 1275.)
Much Crusading, Knights v Mamluks
It IS the engine, right, that people obsess on? No, says Kev, the true enthusiast is enthusiastic about the whole train, or why bother towing heritage carriages? I say that the ones directly behind the engine— which I peeped into but didn’t enter due to the high volume of children— were the carriages of my childhood, with their tall-backed maroon (p)leather seats that you could flip to face forwards or backwards, a genius piece of design. (As seen here: Carriage A1989)
Sure enough, she gave me her disease. Luckily it was only a cold
Err, that’s not how a train goes, babyself
Playcentre is a communally run preschool. The one I attended was just across the road from the house I was born in, that is, it was also right beside the railway track.
This one, the Rainforest Express: The train hidden in the Waitākere Ranges - and the rail enthusiasts trying to bring it back. In the course of investigating the history of this line, I discovered here that the lower portion of track— which ran from Swanson to the Waitākere Dam— later became Christian Road, where I was born. This lower section of line was opened in 1907 and lifted in 1927. Construction materials for the dam were horse-drawn along the tramline to the dam. Essentially, then, I came into this world at the junction of an existing line and a ghost line.
The Rainforest Express is gone now, but Driving Creek Railway in the Coromandel— built by potter Barry Brickell in the 1970s to transport clay— is still running. In my imagining it’s a similar vibe; I’ve never actually been there, though.
Here’s Shayne talking to Kim Hill about the book: Shayne Carter on his memoir Dead People I Have Known
A pale green, opaque variety of pounamu (jade)
River
A giant lot full of hundreds of wrecked cars. The deal is you can purchase the spare parts you need fairly cheaply, but you have to take them out yourself, and there’s no guarantee they’re any good.
Actually, in the scenario of my Nissan Sentra’s head replacement, I guess I was probably more like Igor
The Spinoff has just started a podcast series, Juggernaut, about that phase of our history, and it’s well worth listening to even if you’re not a politics nerd.
Prior to that Ali worked on the Railways: she wishes she still did
Re. coal, George Orwell’s 1937 essay Down the Mine is worth reading. “There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal. They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But-most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence.”
The Government’s abominable fascist Bill which I previously dissed here: Fast Track v. Slow Track. There have since been mass protests, and the news that Australian mining company Siren Gold have applied to mine near Te Waikoropupū, a massive, pristine sacred spring at the Top of the South: the water is so clear and pure one is forbidden from touching it. (More here: Fast-track gold mine plan ‘huge concern’ for Golden Bay) This seems like a deliberate act of desecration, though it’s probably just naked corporate rapacity. But, as I said in my piece, New Zealanders won’t stand for it.
Pollan is quoting psychologist Alison Gopnik’s theory on the consciousness of babies
I’m not joking. You can get a jug for something like $8, but there’s none of your Parrotdog around here
CORRECTION: Jugs at the Tok are $12
I loved this, especially your very apt comparison of trains = communism and cars = capitalism, or socialism vs individualism.
I had a real shocker of a time giving my oral submission against Shane Jones’ fascist abomination on Friday: I wrote a well-researched diatribe against the Fast Track Bill, being hyper aware that I was lucky to be chosen to speak when so many thousands weren’t. Then they derailed me two minutes in because I mentioned, and called it, “the unfortunate incident” of Maureen Pugh getting shoved by a local protesting the Sam’s Creek gold mine that could be fast-tracked under this Bill and which would massively impact te Waikoropupū Springs (as you say, one of the clearest in the world). They accused me (who wasn’t even at the protest and co-led years of non-violent protests and environmental justice movements) of being “threatening” (especially to women politicians - again, a ridiculous accusation seeing I ran for the Greens twice and am hyper aware how misogynistic both politics and the public abuse of female politicians are) merely by mentioning that locals were upset and would continue to protest the destruction of our tāonga. Idk what they expect to happen when Shane Jones gets zombie mining projects resurrected all over the place, but it’s going to be mega-divisive and upset a lot of Kiwis. Still, they cut down my submission time, so I couldn’t get my points (and jabs against Shane Jones) across 😔I just hope they didn’t use that tactic against everyone who mentioned local protests!
I love the moments of familiarity and recognition though this - that’s just like my dad too, pick a part on Saturdays, that’s where Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett got its name etc. Hard to explain but this one really connected. Thank you!