Red Rattlers

Very few of my readers - which is a small percentage of nothing, I fear - would know what a "red rattler" was.

When I were a lad ... seriously, I'm talking about my teenage years ... there were trains that my father (who never caught trains) would refer to as "red rattlers". These were the trains left over from his youth. They had windows that, if they opened at all, slid down from the top (like school rooms of the day), had seats that were unlikely to be reversible - if the seat back was still attached, & doors that didn't close. I kid you not. I can even remember a friend of mine, as we pulled out of the station, jumping off such a train with the cry "I don't want this train!". He'd forgotten that he was meant to meet his mother to get a haircut after school. He got a broken ankle & cuts & grazes up & down his body instead. The police rang me that afternoon to ascertain that he hadn't been pushed.

One more thing - these trains were red. They also rattled terribly.

I was thinking of these trains fondly when I turned up at the station to discover that my train had windows that open. There aren't many left, but there are still a few suburban trains that not only precede the time of air conditioning, but are so old that nobody bothered to retrofit them & then glue the windows closed. These trains were almost definitely around in the 1980s or '90s. I would have thought of them as "new". Their trendy one-piece seats would have seemed almost space-age in their construction (but not vandal proof, alas).

I sat in this train, listening to my guard stumbling through the list of stops (without his electronic helper), & wondered how I might look upon those trains that we currently see as the latest technology, in another twenty years.

I mean, a train is a train - they're still two stories with vestibules (red rattlers were single level), three seats on one side, two on the other. That's a Sydney train blue-print from way back. A cryogenically-frozen blind person from the 90s could find their way onto & through a modern carriage. Actually, I think that's where the drivers come from ...

We are creatures of habit. Our rail service is a creature of habit. For all the changes of department name or bureaucracy, government, financial situation, network expansion, or technology, a train is still a tin tube of commuters rattling along two tracks; & that's the way we like it.