Maintain
In this episode we explore the meaning of ‘maintain’, and what it implies in real-world practice
How do we maintain an old railway line?
The physical part of maintenance is straightforward enough - or at least reasonably well-understood, anyway. We’d need to keep checking the condition of the track, signals, ballast and suchlike; we need to keep the green-stuff in check; and around here there are some, uh, interesting challenges about bushfires versus wooden sleepers (railroad-ties) that can destroy the entire line if we’re not careful. But that’s it really: not hard, other than that much of it is literally hard work.
But before we get to any of that, we need to maintain the why. This old line at Maldon first opened way back in 1884, when much of this area was still an active goldfield, there was a fair-sized population, and a real need for transport out to Castlemaine and the mainline onward to the city and beyond. Having its own branchline mattered a lot to a smaller town like this one.
Yet slowly, slowly, over the succeeding century, that why faded away. Cars, trucks and buses had become faster substitutes for much of the railway-traffic; and the roads had become much better, too. Much of the population had wandered away once the gold was gone. In 1970 the spur-line from Maldon to the even smaller town of Shelbourne was burnt-out in a bushfire; and without it, the Maldon line was soon deemed redundant too. No more purpose; no more why.
Apparently.
But that’s not how the townsfolk saw it. It’s a tourist-town: true, they didn’t much need a railway for transport any more, but they did need one to bring in the tourists. A different why; yet a real why nonetheless. It took them about forty years of hard work to get it all back - including awkward problems such as getting their road-bridge replaced after the roads-authority had casually demolished it without asking who it belonged to and whether it was still needed - but the line is now very much an active thing in its current form as the Victorian Goldfields Railway.
Which, however, still needs to be maintained.
And the maintenance keeps changing, because the world keeps changing. Along much of the route, the back-country roads that the rails might cross aren’t all that different from what they were a hundred years ago:
…but even these will need all of the proper road-signs and the rest that go with a present-day road:
But just down the track a bit from that crossing, there’s another one on a main road where sixty-ton trucks come thundering through at sixty miles an hour - and even a single-track tourist-train that only runs two or three days a week needs the full set of signals and flashing lights for that one:
All of the same, of course, also applies to that freight-line, one street over from my house, that’s used only in the grain-season, whose agonisingly slow and and incredibly noisy freight-train lumbers through in the middle of the night only two or three times a year, and that grows a veritable forest of tall-grass and tree-saplings in the meantime. A different kind of maintenance needed there…
But that’s the point, really. We need maintenance to keep things going, year after year, decade after decade, even century after century in some cases. We need a longer view of time to be able to do that. And most of all, to make sense of what’s needed and when and how and who, we need the underlying why.
It’s the why that tells us what we need to maintain. And why.