Restored Red Rattler Ride,10 September 2016 (For Neville Shields) Poem by Danny Draper

We met her at North Sydney, dawdling on the platform,
No acrid cigarette smoke to annoy.
Concrete sleepers, tracks clean of ballast and rubbish,
Took clumsy video vox pops and selfies of our party
On iPhone with anti-shake a given, and
Some of the train arriving, after facing the right direction.
The break smell brought Nev's recollections,
He always liked that smell, now his to recall.
She pulled up gingerly, but definite, on special assignment,
The four car 1926 electric Red Lady seemed a little lost
In the clean world of apartments and haste,
Fragmented shrinking clean spaces and sterile corporate.
Cable ties were removed and doors opened
With posh hotel reverence
By weary, train enchanted, volunteers.
We turned a seat and sat facing each other
Two coming, two going and rolled away.
The line smooth with little wobble
No dah-dah, dah-dah as boogies crossed line joins
Long since welded closed, silencing track rhythms.
Smiles were exchanged in the belly of the snake,
all happily devoured as she slithered to Cronulla.
Train spotters dotted each station to snap a connection,
Rail clients gazed, some seemingly bemused,
others stone faced, loathsome with uncertainty,
Tending to fear as if the past had been regurgitated
to confront them, to subpoena them
to a drab, static, pre-connected space,
far from the stupor of incessant dynamic
hypo-connected, never alone, modernity.
Some older folks smiled knowingly and
Little children regardless of context, were open
in their happiness to see anything odd and in motion.
The opposite side of the carriage had no windows open,
Tangarra's burst past, wind whacking against the windows
like a petulant bedroom door slam,
A few people jumped the first time.
Our two windows were jauntily raised to different heights,
breeze and slipstream came and flowed,
Allowing ambiance to throb as noise
muffling chatter, to repeats or silence.
Georges River bridge became Botany Bay,
Fleeting water views sped as our red wombat
Scurried assiduously through its open air burrow
Beneath root of bridge and rock of tunnel,
The rail corridor weedy, stations mostly stark, under surveillance,
accessible, rebranded, tidy, online, cashless,
ticketless, minimally staffed, open renovations
and economic rationalism paved over ghost gardens.
Some Gevillea sericea, sparse, inaccessible, pink specks
persisted on southern embankments to Kirrawee station.
Locales provoked shop talk of old jobs
between track and the Princes,
Trees mutilated to clear aerial utilities
prodded long held disdain,
Fossilized lopping producing old and odd regrowth.
Apartment clusters recently sprung like mushrooms
From carrion hidden beneath a cleared field,
Oddly disjunct from a continuous heritage that culture avows,
Wolli Creek appearing as oblique a contrivance as Rhodes,
A built community dominated by spartan hardscapes
clamped precariously to a transport node.
We alighted at Cronulla terminus and headed to the street market,
An hour and a bit of free time like some European bus tour,
Walking and grazing on Russian snacks, Yeros,
and Paella in cardboard tubs with wood splades,
Looking at photo art, tops and stalls aimed mainly at women,
Then onto our red rattler and back into time
Making a pace, picking up a wobble and a rattle
beneath Spring Sydney clear skies.

Danny Draper
11/9/2016