Reports from a failing system

I rode Auckland's collapsing train system yesterday, from Glen Eden to Newmarket. Fourteen stations, on the western line. Each stop was announced, well in advance, by an electronically distorted voice, a voice so slow, so solemn, that it might have been listing the stations of the cross. I was not riding Auckland's rails to get anywhere. I was riding just to ride. I knew there was trouble - rolling strikes, wildcat walkouts, unseemly arguments - at Britomart Station, the headwaters of Auckland's rail lines. I wanted to feel the system slow down, break down.



The trains and train systems are not supposed to break down. The train was, is, the vehicle of modernity. It taught humans the pleasure of acceleration, the thrill of speed, the shock of deceleration. When we sniff cocaine or inject heroin, we seek the same ecstatic transport as ancestors who bought tickets at King's Cross, St Pancras. Long before television, before movies, trains created moving images: their passengers were the first cinemophiles, watching plotless epics filled with cornfields, smokestacks, cacti, as they rolled across Europe, America.



The stops at each station on the Western line lengthened, until they became pauses, then delays, then extended delays. Shorthanded by their comrades' rolling strikes, crews struggled to inspect tickets, tracks. At each station there were crowds, coagulations.

 

At Newmarket, at five o'clock, I found a huge, glum crowd: yawning schoolboys from the western & southern diaspora of Auckland Grammar, suited commuters punching out anti-union tweets on their phones, Japanese tourists with tiny i pods hanging around their necks like dogtags.



I became preoccupied with one of the fellow stranded, a man I could not quite see. He had a blurred, hairless head, a too-small suit the colour of an old urine stain. He held his suitcase with a shivering, reluctant hand, as if it were the black box from some crashed plane.

By six o'clock I was suddenly desperate, like the old rail riders, for authority, for a blue uniform stamped AUCKLAND TRANSPORT. I wanted a strongman or woman, a leader, someone with a loud hailer & a timetable, someone who could conjure a train, fashion a queue from the chaos.



The escalator to Newmarket's ticket office had stopped in mid-flow, like an Alpine waterfall in winter. A dispensing machine took coins, but held its drinks. Auckland Transport had tried to replace workers with machines, but now machines were rebelling, & joining the strike...