It’s always been a difficult one.
Are we really agents of free will, able to make intelligent choices on the attractions of chocolate ice-cream and comforting politicians?
Well, I can now announce that we do, in fact, live in a mechanistic universe. Free will and informed choices about ice-cream and politics are nonsense.
Take steam trains.
Isaac Newton’s third law of motion (subsection S) states that a steam train passing through a regional town will make people leave their nice warm homes on a winter’s day, stand in the industrial back blocks on the edge of town in the biting wind and furiously wave or climb mounds of gravel to take photos.
Little kids will absolutely jump up and down, dogs will bark and sober adults will become tilting windmills at the approach of a steam train.
And that is exactly what happened.
It was proof that we are bound by the laws of motion and previous behaviour.
All this became apparent at the weekend when Steamrail Victoria brought two vintage steam locomotives to town for a jolly chugg to Tallygaroopna and back.
The Chief Gardener took time out from her emergency pruning schedule to book ourselves and three grandkids tickets for a ride aboard the Nostalgia Express.
Passengers came from everywhere to crowd the Shepparton station platform for the arrival of the 2pm K153 train — and it wasn’t just grandparents like us who had once actually travelled on steam trains.
Even adults too young to be afflicted by the childhood adventures of Enid Blyton were climbing aboard the Tallygaroopna Express. Perhaps to them, it was the Hogwarts Express.
Once aboard, I had to squish my shoulders to the panelled walls to allow people to pass. I don’t remember people being so huge the last time I was in a train corridor. When we found an empty compartment, the first thing we did was open the window. What’s the point of travelling on a vintage train if you can’t feel the air rush past at a rattling 50km/h? An open window also helps make waving so much more frenzied.
When the train whistle blew, it sounded so lonesome; I was suddenly in Folsom Prison with Johnny Cash. I sang the opening lines to my grandkids: “I hear the train a-comin’, it’s rolling round the bend, and I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when”. I explained that the moaning sound of the harmonica in early blues songs was based on the train whistle.
All three stared at me with earnest, blank faces. I could see them thinking — Pop’s going bonkers again.
Then I got a whiff of cinders and smoke, and I was standing on the railway bridge in my childhood home town of Pontarddulais in old South Wales. We used to play Germans and British in the woods above the station, and we could hear the train whistle from miles away. It took us four minutes to pelt down the hill and stand on the bridge to get enveloped in smoke and steam as the black monster thundered underneath us on its way to Swansea. A shared pack of smokes was easy after that. Not a cough to be heard.
Filthy smoke-spouting steam trains — as environmentally damaging and noisy as they are — have become memory banks of human progress. They are also a reminder that life used to be exhilarating and gnarly instead of smooth and shiny.
After our train ride, we walked up to the front of the train to ogle the roaring coal fire, giant levers and dials in the driver’s cab. One of the soot-faced, boiler-suited crew members slaked his thirst with a can of soft drink, which he emptied and threw into the coal-filled tender behind him.
He saw my surprise and said the furnace was 2000°F and would burn anything.
Now, that’s useful and exhilarating at the same time.
You don’t get that with a bullet train or a Tesla.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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