pool

A story of straying track plates and other miscellaneous railway spares

Text: A story of straying track plates and other miscellaneous railway spares

from Peter Ravenscroft, 30.08.09

This is about electric trains, not steam ones, but Pool has few class pretensions, so maybe this can go with the steam train stories. 

Here are some slightly different short railway yarns. The source of the stories is a mate of mine, the same Gordon as before, and the main player was his brother, Sonny. Now gone aloft. So they can now be told.

I will try tell the whole yarn just as I heard it today, as best as I can. We were sitting around drinking coffee, four of us regulars, in the signal station kitchen. Me, John, Johnno and Gordon. And of course Fish. Yarning about this and that. After some of his own adventures, Gordon had this to say:

"Me brother, Sonny, he was a bad lad, as I told ya before.. He used to take stuff down to this scrap yard in Sydney, that we best call Nameless Scrap Metal. It of course bears no relationship whatever to any real scrap business in business now, as the saying goes. Well, the manager there, he was under instructions - if that bastard comes in here, drop everything, and whatever he's got, straight into the shredder. So that's how it was.

"One day, he knocked off a whole lot of scrap copper, you know,  the overhead wiring from the electric rail lines, real solid stuff'  I can't remember where he said it was from. "They had about five ton on a one ton ute. My brother," says Gordon, "was high as a kite on heroin, and he was going through some huge set of lights on the south side of Sydney, and he lost it. So, he bent the big pole there to blazes, and he got the gearstick right into him, and in the end lost his spleen or something. Anyway, he was sitting there, whacked, but the first bloke who turned up was a tow truck, before any ambulances or the coppers or whatever. This tow truck bloke, he knows my brother, see. So my brother says, never mind about me, can you get this lot out of here quicksmart, and down to Nameless? So the tow truck bloke  drags the ute away an it and the copper scrap all goes into the shredder He got about five grand for the copper, and the ute was hired, so that was OK..

Anyway, that's not the end of it. Sonny staggers off down the road, a bit out of it, and this car hits him and he reckons he skidded 300 yards, from the impact, but probably he was carried a long way on the bonnet. Still, he lived. The coppers must have been very puzzled. Blood everywhere, this huge pole bent to buggery, but no vehicle. No witnesses, nothing.  

next, not necessarily in time but as the story goes, me brother and his mate was loading a big pile of those railway track plates into the ute. They're only steel, but they are very heavy, so it adds up. Anyway, as they is busy loadin, along come two coppers in a van, and they pulls up. My brother says to his mate, you just start unloadin, so keep yer trap shut and I'll do the talkin. So the coppers front, and they wants to know what's goin on. Sonny says, "We just bought this ute, and it had all these plates in it, and we figured they belonged to the railways. So the cop says "You're not dumpin yer bloody rubbish here, mate. So you just load the whole bloody lot back in yer van and then shove off.

So, as the coppers watched, that they did. 

The other bit of the yarn went like this.

"You know those XPT trains they had, real fancy they were? They had a front end, all moulded, made of aluminium well, and they kept two spares in the railyard at Clyde. when they was new, and all the go, me brother and a mate of his, they fronted at the nameless scrap yard with this whole front bit of the train on the back of the ute. The nose was hanging down over the taillights.. The manager freaks and says, Christ, are you mad, get that fucking thing out of here. Nope, says my brother. We got a deal. So into the big shredder it went. And the manager, he says, don't ever do anything that mad that again, d'ya hear? So they went and fetched the other one. And that was shredded too.

Which may help why, though you have to pay for train tickets, they don't often make much profit, from running trains. 

Hooroo,

Signalman Second Class Jones

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