The Old Station The old station had been sentenced to death and was now being eaten alive. Behind curtains of plywood and corrugated steel, the grizzly task was hidden away from Its passenger #life blood, still ebbing and flowing on its platforms and stairwells. Built twelve decades past of materials deemed deadly for a third of that time, masked and boiler suited crews could be glimpsed through barrier cracks clattering and tearing at its guts. The car had brought the railways to their knees. With half their tracks torn up they had languished, scruffy, neglected, rejected. Then the road arteries clogged, the parking bays filled, the standstills, holdups, fuel cost and death toll, made the ghia trim pale and the exhaust note lose tone. The public on the transport could be tolerated and the journey time could be put to practical use, if only to catch up on sleep. With the voyageur nouveau came sudden profit and the renewal of the aged infrastructure began. Beyond the old stations remains a skeleton arose. Like caricatures of squat bodied giraffes, long necked cranes reached into the sky tending the new born terminus. They sent down long wire tongues that slurped up angular steel bones, lifting them up to the luminous fitters wired to the structure. Lift shafts and stairs, walkways and skylights could be seen in the frame and it's new skin was probably waiting somewhere close by. As the old station was consumed, recycled and reprocessed, it's replacement filled the near horizon readying itself for its corpuscular clients and the second great age of the railways.