"The next tram to depart from platform 1 will be Route 6 to Newleaf."

It was a Saturday morning, and traffic was fairly light. Central could be overwhelming on weekday rush hour with the sheer multitude of sound from eight platforms, eight tracks and 14 regular routes running at 5-minute intervals, but it felt fine right now - the hubbub of the people standing around him, the monotonous drone of the ventilation fans overhead, the footsteps of people walking by, the faint hum of traffic on Ruth M. Gray Memorial Avenue, the cascading tones of announcements on the other seven platforms, and the very faint clanking of the trains to the east in Central Station.

The squealing of the tram as it came out of the reversing loop and towards the platform cut through the layers of noise. Only the PCCs had bogies that squealed like that. The LHBs made much less noise around bends, and the new 3000 Series were basically silent. The last he'd heard, they were trialling a flange lubrication system on the loop at the Mt. Sheilus Interchange.

He hadn't been there in a long time. School had a way of taking over his spare time. Today was a welcome respite from the grind.

Noah tuned into the barely noticeable but distinctive twang of the pantographs on the overhead wires as it rattled and thunked through the trackwork on the approach to the platform. There was just one. This was a usual pair of PCCs, coupled back to back, one of them had the panto down, the standard arrangement, backbone of the tram fleet. The usual consist for Route 6, which was one of the quieter of the many lines radiating from Central. They only got triple sets in rush hour.

The smooth whine of the thyristor as the tram stopped told him it was a second-batch refurbishment. First-batch ones had chopper control instead. Those made a different whine, louder, harsher, more granular. He could very faintly hear one pulling into one of the far platforms in the other direction, probably on Route 1, as most of the first batch refurbished PCCs were assigned to White St Depot. The other two ran Route 33 shuttles in peak hour from Old Town Depot.

The chopper-equipped refurb PCCs weren't as reliable as the thyristor ones, and even less so than the unrefurbished ones. From what he'd heard from other railfans, there had been talk of retiring them early or rebuilding their control systems.

The doors opened. He could hear people getting on, their feet making dull thuds on the steps. He could hear the monotone buzz of the tram's blowers, he could smell the hot air coming up from the electric motors.

He loved all these sounds that trams made. He loved the granular whines and hums that the choppers and thyristors made on startup. He loved the bips of the card readers, the subtle click of the indicator lights at intersections, the ambient hum of the ventilation. He loved all the noises that the bogies made, the squeals and screeches around corners, the little shimmies and clickety-clacks as they ran over track welds and expansion joints and misalignments, the hunting motions from side to side at high speed, the whistling noises on mass concrete track, the big rattles as they ran over butterfly junctions and crossovers. He loved the hum of the motors, the slightly burnt smell, the radiant heat emanating from the blowers, the trill of the gong, the loud buzz as someone pulled the stop request cord.

He didn't travel on buses too much. The diesel fumes made him nauseous sometimes, and they shook and rattled over bumps too much for his liking, but he liked a lot of the noises they made, too. The revving of the engines, the transmission kickdowns when the driver floored it, the singing of tyres over smooth asphalt.

They were machines. They were predictable. People were unpredictable. One moment they could be too quiet for him to understand, and the next they were speaking so loudly that it frayed his nerves to listen to them. For these reasons he didn't really enjoy conversations. He preferred to keep his responses monosyllabic when possible.

In the convoluted hierarchy of things in his mind, cars occupied a niche somewhere between the two. They could be unpredictable. Maybe that was why there were so many car people, because they saw part of their inner self in their automotive companions. They made unexpected noises that seemed harsh to him and scared him at times. They smelled funky sometimes, and sometimes they smelled nice. The only truly relaxing car ride he'd ever had was in the old car of one of his relatives. He only had a hazy memory of it, as he could only have been seven or eight at the time. It might have been French. He really didn't know that much about cars.

Solid as trams were, he had to admit they weren't entirely unflappable. Sometimes they had wheel flats, and the thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk threw him off, but that didn't happen very often. They had door faults sometimes, and that was annoying too.

Some of the older enthusiasts had also told him there used to be much more variation in the differences between individual vehicles, in the old days, when the Canterbury Transport fleet was mostly secondhand.

He had been one of these older trams only once. It was a Birney, a hand-me-down from somewhere on the East Coast of the US. It had smelt old and musty inside, and the seats were hard timber. The wooden body creaked like an old house, and once moving it rocked and jazzed on its hopelessly short wheelbase like a boat caught in a swell.

But the noise. Oh boy, the noise. The roar of the straight-cut spur gears as the driver went through the notches was pure heaven. And then he had gone full parallel for most of the long straight near the Old Town Beach Interchange, and the whole car seemed to come alive, with the warm growl of the gears and the hum of the motors reverberating through the ancient wooden body, through the hard wooden seats, through him.

His thoughts drifted back to his surroundings. The Route 6 on platform 1 was pulling away now, just as a LHB set pulled into the opposite platform. But he wasn't here just for listening to the nice sounds.

He was here for a tour. A farewell tour of sorts, for the last of the unrefurbished PCCs. They would probably last a long time yet, given the leisurely delivery rate of the 3000 Series, but now seemed as good a time as any for a tour. There would probably be another farewell tour, with more coverage, nearer the end.

He had arrived early, as usual. His fellow enthusiasts weren't here yet, or were at least out of earshot.

The trams chartered for this trip were 513, 778 and 1243. 513 had been one of the original batch delivered in 1963. 1243 had been one of the last, delivered in 1977. 778 was somewhere in the middle, delivered around '72, if his memory served him correctly. All three remained more or less in their original condition.

These had been the first new trams Canterbury had ever received, and they had been for the most part built locally at the Constitution Road workshops. Therefore, they occupied a particular niche in the aforementioned hierarchy of things in his mind, somewhere above all the other trams.

Noah had never been particularly comfortable in sharing the vagaries of his thoughts with others, even among fellow enthusiasts. Although he had never asked around to confirm his thoughts, and did not intend to, he suspected there were things that only he could understand in his own special way, and there were knowledge and shibboleths which they shared that he would never be able to understand. They did try to engage in conversation and they helped him whenever they could, but at the same time they seemed to respect his withdrawn nature.

There was this one guy, who he'd befriended on an online forum, a long time ago. He was pretty sure it was a guy, he'd always assumed most of the people on those forums were guys, although it was hard to tell when it was a disembodied computer voice reading their posts out loud. The other guy had been had been adamant that Randwick Racecourse loop in Sydney, with its six platforms and intricate trackwork, was rightfully the greatest piece of tramway infrastructure ever built, far greater than the tramway component of Canterbury's vast central transport hub, an unsurprising opinion considering he was Australian.

It had been a long and winding argument that had touched on everything from the layout of Moszkva tér in Budapest to the long-gone triple-storey Newark Public Service Terminal. Eventually they had agreed that the complex at Central was the greatest extant piece of tramway infrastructure, but there had been greater structures in the past, the grandeur of which would be difficult to gauge without the help of a time machine.

Then they had discussed other things. His new friend had told him about the life and times of Sir Robert Risson, the curious case of No.1041, his far-out theory on the intertwined fates of Melbourne and Göteborg, and his opinions on Sydney's current light rail project, amongst other things pertaining to the trams of Australia. He had in turn told of the history of Canterbury, the massive expansion of the network in the 1960s, the stillborn Canterbury Metro project of the 1970s and its incorporation into the later Interurban project, his rankings of the different types of trams according to his own logic.

They had fallen out of touch some years ago. His username had been west_chester_104 or something like that. He had told him it was a pun on a now-closed branch of the suburban lines in Philadelphia, or something to that effect. A pun on what, exactly?

It didn't seem too likely that he had family heritage in Pennsylvania, not that family matters had ever been the subject of their conversations. So he guessed his name must have been Chester, or something like that. An Australian guy named Chester.

They'd never really opened up to each other, at least not in his opinion. They'd never talked about anything outside of their interests. He had elucidated that they were roughly the same age and that was pretty much it. A missed opportunity. Still, they had talked almost more than he ever had with any other person. Perhaps he had sensed the same deeply personal and idiosyncratic streak in Chester's interest in all things tramway-related, and had found a certain affinity in that.

He wondered what it would take to regain contact, travel and meet him. Australia was far away. He'd never seen a world map, but he had a rough mental picture of how far it was. What would the plane trip be like? What would Chester be like, assuming that was his name? What would his voice sound like? Would he judge him once he found out-

"Noah!"

The sound jerked him from his train of thought. He recognised the voice as belonging to Julian, one of his fellow enthusiasts, who preferred to go by Jules. He liked taking photos.

"How are you?"

"I'm fine. We're early. Aren't we?"

He imagined that Jules was checking his watch. "It's 9:47. We're thirteen minutes early."

"Are you excited?" Jules always seemed to be excited, at least on the relatively few times they had met. It didn't make sense to him half of the time.

"Kind of. Have you seen anyone else?"

"No. We're the first ones, it seems."

Their conversation petered out there, and they stood there silently, waiting.

***

It was late in the afternoon. They had alighted at the Route 16 terminus on White St. They had crossed the street to the depot, a short distance away, and were standing on the sidewalk, listening to the cars rushing by, waiting for the tram to run in.

They had covered almost the entire system, except for the farthest reaches of the Interurban network, which the PCCs weren't authorised to run on anyway. They had run at almost full speed over the Interurban up to Lisburn Junction, where Route 74 to Grindelwald branched off. Jules, who had been filming a cabride video, told him they hit 85 kph at one point.

They'd ridden over quite a few parts of the system he'd never experienced on board an original-condition PCC, which was one of the parts of the trip he'd been looking forward to the most. The connecting line between the beginning of the Interurban stretch and Canterbury West depot. The short section between the terminus of Route 16 and Route 8. There was also the short standalone section of Route 8 to Fernside, which had mostly been serviced by newer vehicles since it opened in the early 2000s. They had also gone over the recently relaid part of Constitution Rd, which he hadn't the time to check out yet.

They had also gone over some sections he hadn't visited for a long time. It seemed that flange lubrication system at the Mt. Sheilus Interchange loop had worked. It did squeal a little on the tighter parts of the loop, but the difference was noticeable.

Every couple of stops, the other passengers would get off to take photos with their cameras and phones. If they were standing close could hear the click of the cameras and their conversations as they posed for group photos. Sometimes he did take part in their pictures; they'd put their arms around him and get him to smile. They'd done so at Briarleaf Interchange, and then the northern extent of the system at Edenvale North, and then at Lisburn Junction. He didn't mind, but mostly he stayed in his seat and soaked up the noises around him, the noises of the tram, the chatter of the people around him.

The lights changed. There was a lull in the traffic and the cars stopped. The tram began to move, wheel flanges screeching as it took the right-hand turn into the depot. He could hear a flurry of camera clicks.

Noah had never truly understood how things were phased out. How did you deal with the loss of something you'd taken for granted when you didn't know better? The Volvo B10Ms had been the only buses he had known in his childhood. They were mostly gone now. Where had they gone? At least a few were in preservation - he'd ridden one, owned by an enthusiast, on another fantrip a few years ago. Some might be doing school bus duty up in the Highlands. Some might have ended up as party buses. But where were the rest? Scrapped, probably, or rusting quietly in the back of a depot somewhere.

It made him a little sad that the ultimate fate of the three trams before him would probably be similar in nature. The end was in sight, and that made him uneasy. It was a very faint sense of unease, but its presence was undeniable, and that put him on edge. 

But this tour did give a certain level of closure. Standing on the sidewalk, listening to the squealing flanges of the triple set as it negotiated the complex trackwork leading into White St Depot, the driver sounding the gong to alert any distracted pedestrians, or maybe as an acknowledgement to anyone filming, he felt an odd sense of calm.

He was all too aware that to most people, the three vehicles before him represented little more than just a ride to work or school or the mall, or wherever they needed to go. But there was so much history behind the thin metal panels. It was the tram that had fought back against the surging wave of bus replacement, that had battled the urban decay of 1970s Philadelphia, sported all kinds of wacky paintjobs in Pittsburgh, lived obscure second lives in places ranging from Mexico City to Cairo, spawned countless copycats, and had been reborn countless times in all manner of bodywork.

And thrived, in of all places, this island outpost of no great empire.

He recalled a tidbit his (former) online friend had told him years ago. Years before, when the long-term future of Melbourne's trams was still by no means certain, they had run a recruitment drive with the simple slogan, "trams are here to stay."

He listened as 513 led the way into the depot complex, closely followed by 778 and 1243. They were alive, they were kicking and they were in rude health. For the time being at least, they were definitely here to stay.