2.

The Art of Engine Driving (I)

There is a train out there somewhere. Vic lights a cigarette, drops the match then turns his head to one side, facing Rita, so as to hear it better. With his ears to the west, and his eyes on the still figure of his wife lingering by the long grass of the paddock, he listens to the train.

He knows it’s a goods. And, by the time of the evening, he can judge where it’s come from, the stops it’s made on the way. He knows how full it is from the thud of the wheels hitting the rail joints just as he knows the class of the engine from the sound of its motor. And when he’s put all this information together he might even be able to tell you who the driver is. For he knows their styles, most of them, the best of them, the artists. He knows their characteristics, their defining touches, the signatures that they leave on the rails, there to be read by those who know how, as clearly as a painter’s on a canvas.

Vic can visualise the scene in the cabin. The gauges are all lit up before him in the night. The speed, the steam, the air pressure. All there before him, but he never reads them. Driving is a gift. Physical. Something you’ve either got or you haven’t. Some drivers watch the needles bobbing about in front of them all night, the needles, the gauges and the numbers. They drive by the book, but he threw the book away the first night he got in the cabin and sat in the driver’s seat.

You can stick your numbers and gauges. I don’t trust them. I never have and I never will. Oh, you can drive by the book, take the curves and the descents at regulation speed and you’ll arrive on time and everybody will call you a good driver. But a great driver drives with his fingertips and his arms, his shoulders, his stomach, the back of his neck, his intestines, his entrails and toes. You don’t need gauges, your body’s full of them. It’s telling you what you need to know, all the time. But only a few listen. And that’s the difference between a good driver and a great one. The great drivers listen.

When I’m out there in the night, in the rainy hills and the soaked cuttings and there’s another train coming towards me, its headlights making a yellow path through the forest and clouds, I know within seconds if I’m watching a great driver. By the speed, the controlled daring, or the way a driver prepares for a sudden, clean descent. The great drivers will leave their individual stamp all over the move. They won’t be reading gauges, they’ll be listening to their bodies and listening to the engine. And all the time, all through the journey, as they scatter the cattle and the low mist before them, the boast will be, and the boast will be true, that the full metal mug of tea sitting beside the driver’s seat was never once disturbed.

Driving begins with shaving, once, then twice. A good sharp razor and lather. You can’t drive without a clean face.

When you come to the curves and bends, lean out of the window and turn your face to the wind, and the air on your cheek will tell you all you need to know. It will tell you the speed of the engine more accurately than any instrument. If it’s too fast or too slow. Then look down to the sleepers flying past beneath you and pay attention to what your eyes and the clean-shaven side of your face tell you.

There are times, coming down through the mountains with a trainload of ballast behind me, when I forget the instrument panel altogether, forget the speed regulation notices by the side of the rails along the way, and take all the winding curves that lead down into a waiting station by feel alone. The trees are rushing by in the night, the train’s creaking and groaning behind me as the weight shifts from side to side, and I can feel the wind on one cheek and the glow of the furnace on the other, as the forest parts and the low clouds get out of the way. The speed regulation signs go by so fast I couldn’t read them if I wanted to. Then, when we hit the incline I always knew was there – because the first thing you do in this game is learn your roads and gradients by heart – the engine hums up the hill and takes it in one mighty wallop, and we take that last ride down onto the plain, using the wide, sweeping curve of the rails to slow the train. And by the time we hit the flat that leads into the station we’re back to regulation speed again. No one knows how I do it, and I’m not telling. That’s my business. All I can say is it’s like dancing. You never doubted that your feet would take you where you wanted them to be. That’s driving too. And you don’t do it by following the book. I know the guard’s been hanging onto his seat back there in the van, and the stationmaster’s slowly shaking his head in the light of his lamp as we ease into the platform because he heard us roaring down through the hills like we were going to take the whole station with us.

From there on it’s flat land and level track. In a few hours the sky starts to lighten, yellow and rose, and we’re driving into the best part of the day. The part nobody sees. The city laid out before us. Wide and flat. Street after street, front yard after front yard. In the distance I’ll see my own suburb, picture my house, my family asleep inside. I’ll sleep through the day, then rise in the afternoon, wash and shave, fill my bag with tea and tinned stew, tobacco, cakes of yellow soap and swabs. All in readiness for the night again; for the hills, the curves, the cutting, and the stations that will stay lit up because they know we’re out there.