The Thing About Railway Stations
Blogs and extras are bonus content to supplement the work in our issues. We asked Tess Casey, author of The Doyles in Issue 25, to tell us about her connection with railway stations.
My dad had an amazing gift for appreciating small things and telling great stories. The railways featured frequently. He spoke about being a boy in Te Kuiti and waiting for the Auckland to Wellington Express to come through every evening. He loved watching the process of topping up the water tank and the chaos caused by a porter who always gave the all clear for the train to leave the station before the passengers were back onboard. He loved railway fruitcake and the fact that the lowly railway crockery was made by Crown Lynn and later became collectors’ items.
The first time I went on a train, I was too small to remember it well. My mother took my sisters and me from New Plymouth to Whanganui to visit a friend. It was the era of disco, platform shoes and glitter, and the train was named Blue Streak. I don’t remember it being blue, or streaking. I have an impression of it being green and of moving backwards through the countryside and stopping often.
I must have enjoyed it because if I ever have a chance to travel by train, I’ll take it. I like the way trains tend to skirt around the edges, showing you glimpses of places that you wouldn’t normally see. Sometimes it’s the untidy, back ends of towns and sometimes it’s the uninhabited middle of nowhere.
There’s something easy and relaxing about being on a train, but I find railway stations both fascinating and kind of unsettling. Historically, they don’t have a good reputation. Some bad moments in human history involve railway stations. They’ve been places of forced separation and terror. Maybe that’s why they’re frequently the setting for disturbing scenes in books and movies. Anna Karenina. Murder on the Orient Express. Platform 9¾. In New Zealand art, our railway stations are often depicted as small, isolated buildings dwarfed by big landscapes—like the railway station in Rita Angus’ painting Cass. Or Grahame Sydney’s July on the Maniototo. Lonely places and empty tracks.
When I was writing The Doyles, which is set in 1932, I had to think about how Mrs Doyle would leave. I knew it would be by train. The idea for the story comes from a known, but unproven, family legend about my great-grandmother leaving her child at a railway station. I didn’t know much about train travel at that time. It turns out it was big. The population of New Zealand was about 1.5 million people, and there were about 28 million train passengers per year. Railway stations were important.
You can see it in the architectural effort put into the railway stations in our main centres. Vaulted ceilings, tiled floors, giant clocks. It was easy to see tiny Mrs Doyle and her young son in one of those large, chaotic spaces, surrounded by strangers who didn’t see them or understand what was happening.
People pass through railway stations, focused on being somewhere else. They’re portals, containing all the tension and turmoil of arrivals and departures, greetings and farewells, the fear of being late or left behind, the worry of not being picked up, the boredom of waiting. It’s not surprising, then, that railway stations seem unsettling. They are full of unsettled people.
A lot of people have asked what happens to the little boy in the story. I think that someone will help him. It’s less likely that anyone will help Mrs Doyle. But that’s another story.
