Tramp Royale by Heinlein Robert A

Author:Heinlein, Robert A. [Heinlein, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Travel, Fantasy, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780441004096
Amazon: 0441004091
Goodreads: 46558
Publisher: Ace Trade
Published: 1992-04-01T08:00:00+00:00

The booking clerk at the railroad station in Johannesburg had refused to give us a return booking from Nelspruit to Johannesburg and had given me a lecture instead. I had attempted to book our return as soon as we arrived in Nelspruit but had been told by the station agent there that it was too late to book except directly with the train conductor; he advised me to come down a bit early and see the conductor.

I was baffled. How it could always be the wrong time to make a train reservation, when we disembarked in Cape Town, when we arrived in Johannesburg, and when we arrived in Nelspruit, I did not understand and still do not. But there it was-jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today. So we hurried through an excellent dinner at the Hotel Paragon in Nelspruit-the Paragon deserved its name-and Mrs. Morgan took us down to the train in good time. When the conductor stepped off the train we planned to buttonhole him.

So did fifty other people. We didn't even get close to him.

Not that it mattered, he was letting no one on. We did hear him tell one woman with a baby that she could stand up all night in the vestibule but that was the best he offered. It was a holiday crowd, returning from the seaside; even the seats in the dining car were occupied. The next train was twenty-four hours later and we had no assurance that we would be able to get on even that train-the station master either could not or would not issue reservations for it.

The railroads in South Africa are atrocious, not because of equipment but because of management-sort of a Long Island Railway on a grand scale. True, the equipment could be better in many ways, but the real defect seems to be a total absence of any notion of traffic management. The bureaucrats who run it seem to have borrowed a slogan from an earlier, ruggeder day in American industry: "The public be damned!"

This weekend was the end of a school holiday; any traffic engineer owning a slipstick, having access to the records of previous years, and possessed of enough savvy to figure his own retirement pay could have predicted the service needed that weekend after finishing the morning paper and still have had time to take a long coffee break. But oh no! they had to run it like a game of musical chairs, with children left standing when the music stopped as an expected part of the game.

I have already noted that it was Sam's hospitality and Sam's Pontiac that got us out of Cape Town; all trains were booked solid three days ahead-with no intention of adding more equipment. The same conditions prevailed all over the country. Compounding the annoyance was the barely veiled insolence of Afrikander civil servants, an attitude of who the hell are you to even expect to ride our railroads.

I would have no right to complain if it were

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