The lights at the intersection turned green. The Monaro revved. I shut the doors and pressed the accelerator pedal. The motors effortlessly jolted into action, with a hiss of meshing gears. The controller jerked and jerked again as it went through the motions, and then the steps merged into seamless acceleration.

The speedometer needle slowly swung up. Twenty, thirty, forty.

Melville Road was otherwise deserted. The tracks were relatively new, laid in mass concrete and still in perfect alignment. The motors howled and the bogies tracked true, straight as an arrow. Alongside, the Monaro paced, chrome trim and bodywork glinting in the white glare emanating from the windows, straight-six burbling away.

The speedo kept climbing, and so did the pitch of the motors. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.

Between Albion St and the Moreland Road the road dipped into a valley and out the other side- the 'Big Dipper', as we called it. Before the big track relay of the 1980s this stretch was dreadfully out of kilter from weak foundations and decades of water ingress, and generally treacherous.

It was too late to worry about that. We hit the descent doing sixty-five kilometres per hour. I had the pedal to the floor. The bogies thumped and jolted violently on the numerous dished welds and other imperfections in the track. The body bounced and rocked in all directions on its rubber springs. The window blinds rattled in their tracks and the grab anchors swung to and fro wildly. The wind roared through the gaps in the doors, and the lights threatened to cut out more than once as the trolley pole struggled to stay true to the overhead.

We sped through the darkness, a beacon of white purity cutting through a night of jaundiced stars, the outside world rushing past us, a phantasmagoria of light and dark, of multicoloured blurs lit up in the path of the headlights. The motors screamed like four banshees in perfect unison, their sound almost melancholy; their hum resonated though my body, through my veins.

And then the roadway in front of us swung upward, and the louts in the Monaro were yelling at us that we'd hit eighty. I cut power, and let her coast the rest of the way uphill.

We stopped at the Moreland Road intersection to catch a breath. The guys gave us the 15 bucks and the Monaro took off into the night.

They said they never knew a tram could go that fast.