I was on leave on the 16th. Work commitments had caused me to bounce my dental checkup in December, and while travelling into the city is a pain in the backside, I couldn't (in fairness to both my dentist and my teeth) bounce it again.

I took the camera, half thinking about getting another shot for my "Lunch Time In The Park" series albeit two days off the due date, and 6 years after the last one. However I wasn't going to hang around until lunchtime for that, and the time needed to get out to Pyrmont put me off doing a breakfast one. So I had breakfast, went to the dentist, then started heading home, the first leg of which was a train from Town Hall to Central. I just missed one, but in a couple of minutes the next one came through and it was... this.

I thought I had seen a ghost.

Granted, I'm rarely in the city these days but I could have sworn that all of the silver (stainless steel) trains that had been built in the '70s and '80s (to replace the "red rattler" trains that had been mostly built in the '20s... yes, *19*20s, to be clear, and that's a disturbing thought) had been retired. I found that the original, un-airconditioned S sets (S for "Sweatbox", I suspect, built 1972-1980) were indeed retired in June 2019. However they were but one of three similar looking families; the C sets (built 1986-1987, retired 2021)... and the K sets (built 1981-1985, refurbished in the late 1990s).

The set name? K67. As it turns out, all 40 of the K sets (160 cars in total) are still in service. Most are in their 40s, making them the oldest members of the Sydney Trains fleet. They're air conditioned (some had to be retrofitted with it), though from my recollections of riding on them in summer this was more in theory than in practice. Similarly the destination indicator that you see here seemed to work for about two weeks after installation and rarely showed a destination thereafter, much as any public address system on a Sydney train works for about a week after installation and then issues forth nothing but garbled buzzing and static for the rest of the train's working life.

This particular instance is operating on what's left of the T3 Bankstown line - my former line - which runs through rock solid Labor seats for the most part. Naturally we always got the (opposite of) the latest and greatest because when Labor is in power it takes the seats for granted, and when the Liberals are in power they know they can't win there so why bother spending money there? I say "what's left of" because some freaking genius has decided to turn the Bankstown line into a metro line, effective from 2024. It was bad enough spending 25 to 30 minutes on a sweatbox when travelling into the city; when the conversion is complete you'll get to do it standing as well. (Except it may take more than that because every metro service will be all stations, whereas some of the heavy rail services were express.)

Mind you, 20-25 minutes seems like luxury compared to the 2 hours that it takes me now.

One day these really WILL be retired, of course, and the opportunity to shoot them will be gone. As I keep reminding myself (and then keep forgetting, and then keep reminding myself again...) it matters less that the shot is pedestrian (as this one surely is) than that pieces of life, pieces that will eventually disappear, be documented while the opportunity is still there.

I suppose that it would be an appropriate time to mention the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds, but by the time that song and its related movie The Breakfast Club was released, the K sets had already finished their production run. There's a bit of context for you to chew on.