Life Think #63: Train Station of the Week

Wyong
Etymology: Combination of “Why so glum?” and “What’s wrong”.

With an aerial concourse, three spacious pre-cast concrete platforms and overhead canopies reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s neo-industrial nightmare Metropolis it’s not difficult to see why Wyong maintains its lofty status as station de jour.

“It’s funny, you know,” says station master Bobby Iambivic, “Commuters travel to all corners of the CityRail network but they all seem to return here eventually.” This is never truer than in the P.M. peak, when the station’s fluorescent lighting and unreliable power supply combine to create an outlandish spectacular, which has even the most discerning epileptics foaming at the mouth for more.

“It has no ticket barriers!” screams depressed local Steven Simms, before hurling himself off the overbridge and landing on the tracks below.

But it’s not all good news: The station is nay impossible to access for the wheelchair-bound making it a veritable Mecca for bigots and charlatans alike. The over 30cm difference between train floor and platform levels often yields the tragicomedic sight of an unsuspecting disabled tumbling violently out of the train, the pathos made more acute by the proximity of the nearby portable wheelchair ramps, locked up and completely inaccessible (a microcosm of the station which surrounds it).

Peter McCallum, senior theatre reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald, put the station in its full historical context three years ago with a typically caustic review:

“First I need to be honest and say that I found Wyong Train Station the vilest thing I have experienced. Not on account of its garish motif, but because of the hectoring stereotype in the design which left no space to preserve one’s own inner perspective as a viewer. Others had a different view.
Distinguished railway hobbyist, the late Andrew McCredie, for example, placed the station in the context of the European polystylism and Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty.
It’s difficult to be so generous when one has been visually and psychologically raped, both figuratively and literally, for I left this station understanding exactly why almost half the northbound trains terminate here, for I was nigh on the precipice of terminating myself.

Readers must make up their own minds but for me, I would just say no.
No stars, that is.”

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