The 3AM goods train seemed to pass hard against the house this morning, the gap between a kind of funnel that sucked the roar directly through the walls. Everything was child’s scale: the leaping side of the passing beast, the funnel of the street, the vulnerable house. Adding to the helplessness were the detonations. (Surely Arthur can’t be right about the warnings to the workmen up the line. It seems it is only the train in the middle of the night that carries that accompaniment.)
Following fuller wakefulness, another industrial-like blast was heard a little distance off. Escaping steam it might have been.
With the repetition it was clear it was the possum in a kind of undertone, snorting a casual warning. Or mating was it? This was far from the fierce, hellish battle-cry that we have become used to through the summer. And no clambering recently, either along the side of the house, or over the roof back and forth.
Last night for an earlier train the diesel hung heavy in the air a long time afterward. Sometimes on a Sunday the steam engine still came by, some kind of novelty run with parents & children from Newport most likely.
Heavily loaded wagons rocking over the sleepers made the glass in the windows vibrate on that side of the house. The train to Adelaide was sometimes shunted through Newport and passed us here.
Interesting to note, guests in the house quickly settled to the ruckus, even after a single night. We had domesticated our train. It belonged to us in Watt Street and Montgomery Crescent more so than those other streets further a field.
When Ash & Barb moved into the corner house it was good to hear the train was considered an attraction by the pair, rather than any kinda negative.
Years ago Neda from around in Kernot Street threw herself under the wheels, as Babi too had thought to do once or twice back in the troubled early days.
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