SRB Picks of the Week 12 July 2008

:By Jeremy Rose

My childhood bedroom was about 10 metres from the Johnsonville railway line – halfway between Simla Crescent and Boxhill Stations – and the passing trains rattled the Victorian sash-windows next to my bed. The English Electric DM/D Class Units that plied the line had a powerful Cyclops-like headlight and the shadows it cast raced around my bedroom walls.

So why the nostalgia?

It’s hard to open a newspaper or magazine these days without coming across some new “green” mode of personal transport. Paul McCartney has a hybrid stretched limo and Hollywood stars are to be the first allowed to lease to hydrogen cars.

The idea of an eco-friendly stretched limo is plainly bullshit. But the English Electric DM/D Units really are a green wonder. The first Morris Minors were a decade from rolling off the production line when the DM/D Units started their daily commutes on the J’Ville line 70 years ago last week. The trains and the men and women who have kept them running for seven decades deserve to be celebrated. The units seemed old when I first rode on them nearly four decades ago. The chrome handles on the reversible seats were worn to the point where the brass underneath was exposed and cigarette butts were ground into the gaps in the floors, creating a mosiac-like carpet. The units would rate as vintage if they were cars but somehow they’ve been kept going – refurbished every 15 or 20 years and are still recognisably the same trains. These electrified and collectified stretched-Morris Minors deserve a place in the Green Hall of Fame (if it doesn’t already exist it will soon.)

With impeccable timing Victoria University has put the entire New Zealand Railway Magazine on-line. The magazine was published from 1926 to 1940 and includes this coverage of the arrival of the DM/Ds and this wonderful description of Queenstown by Robin Hyde.

The idea of Robin Hyde writing for the Railways reminded me of those fantastic Len Lye films commissioned by the British Post Office.

If was an era when industries and enterprises were proudly owned by the people and weren’t afraid to celebrate their existence. Maybe now that the Railways have been re-nationalised we can look forward to it commissioning some of today’s hot young talent to do something equally cutting edge.

But not if the Listener has anything to do with it. Last week’s editorial raised the spectre of the railways becoming an insatiable consumer of taxpayer dollars.

The editorial claimed there was “no successful international model on which KiwiRail can be based. Finance Minister Michael Cullen acknowledges it may never make money”.

But making money shouldn’t be the only measure of success. The Johnsonville-line is a case in point. Without the DM/Ds carrying thousands of commuters a day into the city the roads would have been clogged, our foreign reserves would have been even more depleted with more imported oil consumed and more cars imported.

Virtually every country in Europe has a successful – publicly owned – railway system on which KiwiRail could model itself. One that doesn‘t is Britain whose attempt at creating a market driven rail system has been as disastrous and costly to the taxpayer as our own. You can read just how disastrous here.

The Guardian has a rave review of Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria

The recent death of a Kiwi-born soldier temporarily refocused the media’s attention on the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The Independent has a review of Descent Into Chaos, by Ahmed Rashid which sounds like a must-read for anyone interested in the topic.

Hazel Rowley talks about her new biography of Richard Wright on ABC’s The Book Show. Well worth a listen for any fans of Wright. I was particularly interested to hear of James Baldwin’s attacks on Wright in the ’50s – something he later bitterly regretted, apparently.

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