But I am wondering why his enjoyment was quite so carefree!

Last year, he’d have reached Newcastle Baths in the same time; coffee with sea view.

Next trip, our elected guardians might instructively pretend:   

1) They make the trip daily, and in time for work. 

2) Their family has one car or none.

3) They are themselves weak, aged and using a walker, for a day’s fishing off the Newcastle boardwalk.

4) They are taking five small kids to the beach, all carrying beach equipment.

5) That their doctor can only see them at noon, (easy on the Muswellbrook 10.09am train before mode change) and there’s heavy shopping to do afterwards.

6) Their niece at Wyong has at last got a job; starting 6.30am in a beachside café, Newcastle.

7) They are lugging baggage off the Sydney plane from Amsterdam for a Newcastle beach holiday.

8) They are taking a group of 23 Scouts economically by train, to examine the rock pools.  

9) Lastly, pretend the three destinations desired by 75 per cent of Hunter Line travellers have been cut off the rail system by a political party they do not favour.      

Mode changes kill transport systems. Well known. Why? 

1) Varying nuisance for all, 2) complete block for some and 3) all people are important.

Well now, how overwhelmingly vital is it really, that some of the privileged car drivers back home pay 10 cents a litre more than in Sydney for a few weeks? Big deal.

How essential is it, given a safe bridge for avoiding all rail crossings in Scone, to have another, unsafe bridge doing the very same thing, in a location utterly disastrous for the town?  

How critical is it, for whom and why, to hush up the downsides of that?

Let’s pretend now, that we are driving a loaded B-double up the slope to the traffic lights at the T-junction on the S bend crest of that much pushed overbridge, eight metres above the train passing below.   

Or, that we are elderly, and skirting Elizabeth Park on the way from the memorial on Anzac Day... sorry, can’t. Don’t even try.