It began with a rolling mutter in the rails, faint at first but rising rapidly, as if an electrical storm had mustered behind the Razorback and begun to pour along the valley floor toward the town. The children stood rooted to the buckled station platform, stupefied and afraid. Iron ground hard against iron; Anna’s ears rang with it. Soon even the light was ploughed under. She felt a spasm in Hugo’s tiny hand, then nothing, only a tingling sense-memory in her empty fingers. She looked around for him wildly, began to run. She found him in the baggage room, trembling in a head-concealing squat beneath the solid redwood counter top. Outside, the engine rumbled past the ticket office, the waiting room, the signal box, before flattening into a string of red carriages, glass-rattling and benign, with drop-jawed, frayed-collared faces elbow-propped here and there upon the varnished windowsills, staring out, registering nothing. Don’t cry, Anna said, I’m here, it’s all right. She heard her mother’s conking heels behind her. I’ve found him, Mum. Let’s wait here, shall we? her mother said. They listened as couplings took up the slack beyond the gloomy walls, a fussy shunting in the two-line yard punctuated with timorous pauses and incompetence. When the train drew away they returned to the light. Maxine’s father was there, his black uniform cap gleaming plastically above his dead white forehead. He helped them down the steps with a hand to their elbows and a little pointless laugh: Mind how you go, Mrs T. Opposite them, marooned on a shunting line beneath the wheat silos, a single carriage waited. The children and their mother stepped carefully over the asphalted rail ties. Anna looked left and right for runaways and soundless beasts. Up into the carriage. They were not the first. Other mothers waited with new babies and fretful small children. Aunt Lorna looked up, mute, exhausted, quickly grievous, the twins clutching her knees. Whooping cough, she said, as if Anna’s family had it easy in the world, in the big house across the creek from her on Isonville. The nursing sister twitched back a curtain. Who’s first today? she demanded, grim and brisk, stuck in this backwater for the day. When it was their turn, the children’s mother explained that Hugo could not get his breath at night. Try a eucalyptus inhalation, the sister suggested. Then she paused: Mrs Tolley, this is the Baby Train. Hugo’s rather too big now. It’s not fair on the other mothers. Sometimes, far away across the lucerne flats, Anna watched the goods trains crawling north into the dry wastes. Once she lost count at seventy-nine carriages and her father explained that the Electricity Trust had erected a town overnight upon a seam of desert coal. Hugo built a winding track around blue-metal boulders collected from the driveway and over icecream-stick bridges. He funnelled pebbles into the tiny open ore carriages and on the days when the asthma clawed at his throat he might viciously stage a derailment and trample progress into the dirt. In Anna’s final year at the high school, a handful of teachers took the seniors by train to Sydney, then up the eastern seaboard to the tropics. It was winter; the train’s heating often failed in the night hours and Anna and Lockie slept shoulder to shoulder under a Black Watch blanket. But she could not sleep. There was a niggling, an irritation, a sensation close to appetite and provocation. She rolled with it, the endless growl and shimmer of the massed iron beneath her groin. She parted her legs a little; her eyes rolled back; her lips peeled slowly open. It rose floodingly in her and she gasped. She reached for Lockie’s fingers and showed him how and where she wanted them. There was no light, only a moongleam at the edges of the flapping window blinds, but sufficient to show Anna a glint of envy and acute attention in the kids sitting opposite her, awakened by something, alerted to something. She sometimes thought of that night—a night in the education of her senses—whenever she rode by train through the tunnels under London, the metal ceilings and curved-glass walls tightening around her, the hand straps clinking like sounds from a bad dream above her, the human odours and viciousness aroused by timetables, IRA bomb threats and eyeball-to-eyeball intimacy with sour strangers far beneath the city. No one ever talked. A man with an unlit cigarette between his lips had it snatched out and ground into the floor by a man who screamed and pointed at a no smoking sign. That was enough for Anna. Coming halfway around the world had cured her of her grief. She went home, got married, had a son and then a daughter. The son was captivated by trains and ducks. Trains rumbled through his books and toy cupboard; a slow duck circled in the air currents above his bed; a train frieze ran from door hinge to door latch at chest height around his room. Whenever Michael saw a real train he reached out his arms to it. His real prize was his Uncle Hugo’s old train set, delivered to him on his fifth birthday packed in the original boxes. Anna looked back down the years but failed to remember the icecream-stick platform, the water tower, the signal box and tiny station clock. The Pandowie line is closed now, replaced by the Adelaide to Broken Hill bus, which stops once a day outside the Four Square Store in the main street. One day dealers will tear it up for the value of the scrap iron and sell the sleepers to landscape gardeners, but meanwhile the 150th Jubilee Committee has restored it temporarily to relive the days of steam. During the months of spring, the original engine and two items of rolling stock run between the town and Last Hope Pass, where the pink-smudge ranges roll on forever across the desert. With any luck, Sam says, we’ll still be running her in the year 2000. Sam and other dignitaries dressed themselves in period costume for the inaugural journey and the mayor made a speech. Anna has written a five-hundred word history of the train and its pioneering times, printed up by Carl Hartwig at the Chronicle as a folded-twice free pamphlet for the tourists. She will ride the train once a year until the service is cancelled. It will be fun: open windows, the smell of the wildflowers on the claypans flats, cinders in the eye. She will never again take a bus anywhere. She’ll rarely fly. Even with bullet trains and whisper-quiet cushioning, the old appeal will be there.