Recently I've resumed my interrupted relationship with Melbourne's trams. We go back a long way, the trams and me. As a schoolboy, clutching my book-heavy Gladstone bag — a preferably battered Gladstone with your initials on it in fading gold being de rigueur in those days — I would climb aboard the number 64 and roll through suburb after suburb to school.
Sometimes I would have to sprint to the departing tram and leap on to the running board. You couldn't get locked out because automatic closing doors were still some years in the future.
When other boys jumped on to a moving tram it looked easy, even graceful. When you tried it yourself for the first time, however, the tram's apparently snail-like progress was transmuted into an alarmingly fast take-off, and a kind of G force pinned you to the running board and made the next step — actually climbing up into the tram — a lead-weighted, gravity-defying coup. In this brief skirmish with momentum and various immutable laws of physics, the Gladstone bag was no help at all.
The trams of my youth were green, with a splash here and there of yellow, and had a crew of two — a driver and a conductor. Drivers underwent a rigorous course of training which encompassed not only the rules of the road but other subtleties — like how to miss every green light while appearing not to be dawdling. In the old days, missing the lights involved inexplicable periods of utter motionlessness or a series of teeth-jarring starts and stops. But the advent of the sliding doors radically changed the driver's range of options.
The skilled driver will shut the doors just as someone dives for the entrance, then chivalrously reopen them, then close them and ring the bell — Melbourne tram drivers are very heavy on the bell — then give the tram a balance-testing forward jerk causing older passengers to brace themselves in their seats and strap-hangers to sway and reach like a trapeze artist mistiming a leap, then reopen and shut the doors and — bingo! red light.
It is the lot of trams everywhere to be welcomed, argued about, derided and threatened with extinction and removal. Melbourne trams have been dogged survivors and shapers of destiny.
In 1990, with the Victorian government of John Cain teetering amid serial financial disasters, trams played a bizarrely central role.