The Way It Used To Be

Consequently, Railway People were distinct, and clannish. And they were governed by customs, traditions, conventions and taboos as rigid as those which held any clan together.

One of the unwritten laws was that Railway People did not really need to leave their circumscribed world. Everything you needed was there, particularly if it was a big railway colony centered around the great junctions with their clanging, hooting, loco workshops. These were the places were the huge black, engines or locomotives were repaired, refitted and restored to sound, steam-driven, health. The shops were controlled by all-powerful Loco Foremen. They formed the steel backbone of the railways and though some of them came from Britain, the best regarded ones were those who had cut their engineering teeth in the railways as 13-year old apprentices: as Daddy had. And because Daddy was a Loco Foreman when I was born, my memories of the Railways were those of a privileged little girl sheltered by and aura and status of my father.

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Fittingly, our house was huge. It had deep verandahs festooned with creepers covered in ice-cream pink flowers: they are still known as Railway Creepers. This blossom-draped house was set in enormous grounds at the edge of a vast field. On the far side of the field was the Institute the center of the social lives of Railway People. Beyond it was the village and the rest of the world. Another world, a different world, an alien world. Long before the Japanese realized the virtues of treating their employees as members of a closely knit corporate family, the GIP, EIR and the BB & CI had nurtured this sense of belonging. Quite frankly you belonged to you railway company, and your company belonged to you.

All this led to a very strange attitude among railway people: why do that extra schooling, men? We can get good jobs without the SC: the SC was the Senor Cambridge School Leaving Certificate. If you had the build for it and were a good sportsman, officers weren’t too strict about your age: after all, he’s railway boy! And so these teenaged boys tied a handkerchief around their heads, had their arms tattooed and began firing: shoveling coal into the engines.

In course of time they handled their own locomotives a s shunters, moving wagons and coaches in the yards, were promoted to goods train drivers and hoped, in time to rise through passenger trains, express and eventually, to the top of the heap as the elite mil train drivers.

The people who drove the engines considered themselves superior because they were loco: quite distinct from loco foremen. On the other hand the employees who looked after the stations and came into contact with passengers as guards and ticket collectors were Traffic. They felt that they were the real administrators of the railways and, therefore, superior to those who merely drove them. Often, therefore, there was an invisible barrier in a railway colony, between the quarters of the loco and those of the traffic railway people worked hard, but they also played jard. The Institute was the centre of their relaxing hours. Here, every evening, the men and women gathered: the men to play billiards or tennis, the women to sit and gossip while the kids played around them. Children were never left at home, not even when the Institute ran its Christmas and New Year parties. They helped their parents decorate the Inster with flags, streamers, balloons and casuarinas Christmas trees trimmed with cotton-wool snow. They sat giggling on the sidelines while their elders danced. Railway society placed considerable stress on enjoying life without thinking of tomorrow. Why think of the future? Why save? The railways looked after you and when you had to retire you got your provident fund and hopefully your sons would have joined the railways and your daughters would have married good railway men.

Thus, the social life of the Inster was a very important part of growing up in a railway colony. And so we went to dances and treasure hunts, and took part in the annual sports organized by the Inster and we learnt, almost instinctively, exactly where to draw the line. These codes of conduct were not enforced by any law makers of council of Elders. They had evolved and were accepted by everyone as the done thing. everyone knew what everyone else did: it was a strong, mutually supportive, society. Railway people enjoyed themselves because their society ensured that liberty never deteriorated to license. Your neighbour would not be allowed to harm you.

But since Railway people had evolved these mores within the tightly structures society of the Railway colony, they found it very difficult to adjust to the outside world. For a while they sought out each other to replicate the warmth of the Railway Colonies. But when their children grew up they established their own connections with their adopted worlds, and spurned the old, trusting, way of their parents. Their society fragmented and began to drift away: to British, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.