track work

I had an adventure this weekend!  I often have adventures, but this one involved trains, so it qualifies as a Great Train Adventure.  Without an exclamation point, but not without exclamations.

It all started when my friend Anne decided to start a dessert company.  Anne, might I just point out, is one of the best bakers I know, and her baked goods are absolutely amazing.  The mango cheesecake is a particular favorite, though the frosting on the malt chocolate cake gives it a very good run for its money.

But I digress.  The situation was that Anne had invited a bunch of people over for the launch of her company, Anne's Delectable Delights, and I was fortunate enough to be among them.  Our friend Rachel also planned to come along and, since Rach and I live relatively near each other, we decided to meet up at Town Hall and go together.

So far so fine.  We met at the Town Hall steps (the quintessential spot to meet up in Sydney) and headed down to the trains.  It was then that our epic journey was first foreshadowed in the form of a tacky yellow sign advertising Track Work.  We stopped and considered, but figured it was worth checking the trains to see which ones were actually affected by the yellow monster of guile.  It turns out that ours was.

Now the train we wanted was one that would take us to Revesby.  Revesby is on the Airport line, and significantly past the turf of Lower North Shore girls.  It's a good way in from the boonies, but it's not at all our neck of the woods.  The fact that we were venturing so far afield speaks volumes, mostly about the deliciousness of Anne's cheesecakes.

Unfortunately the Airport line was undergoing Track Work.  Track Work is one of those, they say, necessary evils that occurs roughly bi-weekly, and virtually always on the weekends.  Weekend travel is troublesome enough what with reduced services and traffic jams (I'm thinking of the buses on Military Road here), but adding Track Work into the mix adds a good half hour and ten pounds of frustration onto your journey.  At the best of times, it can take up to two hours to traverse one side of the city to another; at the Track Work of times, it is much better not to think about how long the journey takes.

I do not know what causes the need for Track Work.  I don't think anyone does.  Presumably it is because the trains use the tracks all day long and the tracks get tired and like a bi-weekly massage and check up.  They may be similar to the copy machine in that regard.  Despite the fact that their proscribed purpose in life is to function -- not even creatively, simply at all -- they seem inevitably unable to.  Perhaps it is poor design.  Perhaps it is poor execution.  Perhaps it is poor self esteem on the part of the tracks.  I haven't a clue, but I am inclined to think the latter.

To this end, I propose that everyone be as cheerful as possible to the tracks.  Whenever you see them, wish them a jolly good morning, or a smashing afternoon, as the case may be.  From a distance, of course.

Perhaps that is it.  Perhaps they just don't get enough love.  They crave physical affection.  They were neglected as young tracks.  People give them wide breadth even now.  I still don't recommend cuddling them (in fact, I wholeheartedly recommend against it), but perhaps a cheery wave or the occasional hello could work small wonders.  Blow them a kiss if you're feeling particularly compassionate.  Perhaps when no one else is looking, though.  I'd hate for that to get misinterpreted.

Until the tracks feel loved, though, I'm afraid we have no choice but to be regularly disrupted by Track Work.  I'm sure it could be worse.  I'm not quite sure how, but presumably it's a theoretical possibility.

So Rach and I found ourselves at Town Hall and realized that our best option was to take a train of a different line to Redfern.  (Thankfully the lines usually take turns feeling under-appreciated.)  The timing worked actually quite well in that we were able to purchase the necessary tickets and find our way to the platform with two minutes to spare.

Two minutes, I have long since decided, is by far the optimal waiting time for a train.  Anything over three gets a bit tedious (what do I do now?  ho hum.  hum ho.  hum hum hum, ho--oh, sorry, sir, didn't mean to say that out loud.), yet one is cutting things entirely too close for comfort.  One usually sees you running headlong down a dangerous flight of stairs, pushing innocent bystanders out of your way and hoping desperately that none of them were pregnant as you shout out a general cry of "sorry!" to your wake.  With two minutes you know you can make it, but not resort to fake texting to keep yourself amused while you wait.

In two minutes, our train arrived and we boarded.  The signs had suggested Redfern was a nice, scenic stop -- well, actually, they'd suggested Redfern was where we should transfer back to our beloved Airport line.  We passed Central, then hopped off at Redfern.

Neither of us knew the station all that well ("look!  there's a level underground!"), but we soon learned that it actually has very many stairs.  We didn't think to count, but suffice it to say we both felt the thigh burn by the top.

At the top, we found two very unhelpful signs (what?  the trains only go north from this station?!) and then realized there were six more just around the corner.  One of them showed a train departing for Revesby in one -- one! -- minute.  We ran.

We needed platform 9.  We saw 10 and we saw 8, but we didn't see 9.  We ran towards 10, hoping desperately that they didn't number platforms like they do residential addresses and skip around with sides of the street and all that nonesense.  Thankfully, they don't.  At least not at Redfern.  Platform 9 was right next to Platform 10, except its sign had been obscured before.

We tore down the stairs in our heels to the waiting train on platform 9 and plopped in, out of breath, but pleased with ourselves.  We could handle this Track Work thing.

When we'd managed to catch our breath, we chatted about where we were supposed to go after Revesby.  My plan, I announced, was to call Anne's husband Raf on the way and ask if he could pick us up.  Rach's plan, it turned out, was to do whatever my plan was.  We called Raf.

Raf was, thankfully, amenable to my plan, and by default Rach's as well, and asked where we were.  I looked out the window.  Sydenham, I informed him.

Sydenham?  He was confused.  Sydenham is not on the Airport line.  I explained they were doing Track Work.  Ah.  He sounded unconvinced and suggested we ask around and make sure we were headed the right way.  I agreed and promised to call back when I knew where we were.

It was about this time that I was remembering the last, and only time, I'd been in Sydenham was the last time I'd gone to visit Raf and Anne and had accidentally taken the wrong train line.  Odd bells of deja vu played in my head and I began to get worried.  Rach asked a guy on the train if we were headed for Revesby and he assured us that, no, we were headed for Campbelltown.  Evidently you can't get trains to Revesby from Redfern, but only from Central.  We promptly bailed.

Thankfully, there was a train stopped on the platform going the opposite way and we rushed towards it, pausing just briefly to yell in, "does this train go to Central?"  The passengers said that it did, so we fell in and hung on for dear life as it jolted into action.

Ten minutes later we were back at Central, and well on our way to being supremely frustrated.  We were hungry, thirsty and beginning to realize that our make-up was smudging.  Raf had suggested platform 23 as the necessary prerequisite for the Revesby train, so we asked an official the way.  He assured us that platform 23 was not where we wanted to go, as platform 23 was experiencing Track Work.  If we wanted to get to Revesby, he said, we needed to transfer at Redfern.  We explained that we'd just come from Redfern, but he remained insistent:  Redfern was the only solution for Revesby.  They'd rerouted the day's trains because of Track Work, and we needed to go to Redfern.  We had arrived at supremely frustrated.

So, we turned and found the journey entirely less amusing the second time around.  We alighted again at Redfern and scaled its now-familiar steps with the gait of one who has climbed them so many times as to find them extremely mundane.  At the top, we found the correct screens and realized, again, that there was a train departing for Revesby in one -- one! -- minute.  Down the stairs we ran yet again, and collapsed again into a train bound for Revesby.

We'd both checked doubly this time that we'd read the signs correctly, so felt confident in calling Raf to let him know we were, in fact, on the right train this time.  While paused at Sydenham yet again, I read the signs scrolling out of the window out to him so he'd know where we were.

"Fantastic!" he said.  "You've got an express train!"

"Err, yes," I said.  "I guess so."

"Great, you'll be here in 20, 25 minutes," he said.  "Call me when you get there."

Now this is something I have yet to understand, yet it happens nearly every time I get picked up at a train station.  Granted, I am extremely grateful for the lifts, but the sentence still makes no sense:  here I am, calling with 20-25 minutes of advance warning, and the picker-upper still wants a call when I arrive.  Surely it would be more to the point to simply look at the clock and leave in, say, 15-20 minutes?  It's their neck of the woods; I haven't got a clue how long the journey will take.  Which is why I call when I leave station.  Surely the people who live there and take the journey every day are better judges of when I will arrive than I am?  Yet I am consistently asked to call "when you get there," or, slightly more understandably, two stops before.  But really.  I'm doing six times the favor and calling twelve stops out!  Nevermind.  If it gets me lifts, I'm happy enough, as long as I don't run out of phone credit.

The stop before I gave Raf another call.  "We're nearly there," I said.

"Excellent," he said.  "I'll be there soon."

And he was, just a couple minutes after we disembarked, tired, slightly sweaty and extremely hungry.  And he drove us to a home full of chocolate cakes, mousses, brownies, tarts, cupcakes, cheesecakes and more.  We gaped at the table and tried not to drool.

 

And then we settled down into the most delightful of afternoons, full to the very brim and then some.  When we finally made our farewells, we could barely stand up straight.  Raf very kindly drove us back to the station and we again collapsed onto a train a few minutes later.  Unable to function or utter sentences more intelligent than, "wow, that was so good -- but I am so full!" (we were practicing for Thanksgiving later this week), we could hardly think straight to plan our return journey.

In the end it worked out:  we took our train to Redfern, ran up the stairs for the final time, switched to a train to Town Hall, as there was Track Work between Town Hall and Wynyard, where we needed a train to Milson's Point.  We took a bus to Wynyard, then hopped on our final train (#7, but who's counting?) of the day.

I waved goodbye to the lonely track, and blew it a veritable series of kisses.  Then, when everyone else was gone, I flashed it for good measure.