‘Super simple stuff?’: crafting quiet in trains between Newcastle and Sydney

Abstract

The demands passengers place on contemporary public transport systems are increasingly focused on providing a safe, comfortable and reliable transport experience. One expression of these demands is the recent introduction of designated quiet carriages to trains. The experience of travelling in these spaces has been given little academic scrutiny. Using a case study of the commuting experience between Newcastle and Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, this paper investigates the practices, relations and affective atmospheres of quiet carriages. The paper argues that passengers on trains come together to craft quiet through interactions between human and material actors. This crafting of quiet results in noticeably different quiet atmospheres at different times of day and in different parts of the journey. Drawing on participant observation including an auto-ethnographic account of travelling in a quiet carriage, the paper distinguishes between four types of quiet crafted by the passenger collective – sleepy and comfortable quiet, busy quiet, tense quiet and spooky quiet. These four types of quiet play upon the body with different intensities and some have stronger affects that linger after the completion of the journey.

Keywords:

• Quiet
• crafting
• passengers
• affect, atmospheres
• train travel

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our colleagues from the Discipline of Geography, University of Newcastle, and the thesis examiners, who gave insightful comments on this work at key points in its evolution. This paper was presented at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2015 in the session ‘Cultural Geography: Moving bodies for geographical thought – intensities’, and thanks must be extended to the session participants for their feedback also. We would also like to thank the reviewers of this article for their thoughtful and encouraging critiques.

Notes

1. As these posters were produced by anonymous members of the general public, copyright permission to reproduce the joke quiet carriage poster in this article could not be obtained. The poster can be viewed in the article by Ironside (2012) linked in the reference list.

2. This paper has been produced based on research carried out for the Honours Thesis of Ainsley Hughes, which was supervised by Kathleen Mee and Adam Tyndall. As such, the auto-ethnographic accounts weaved throughout this paper are from Ainsley’s fieldwork experiences.

3. It is worth noting that since the fieldwork for this paper was conducted, the Newcastle–Sydney heavy rail line underwent the highly publicised truncation at the Hamilton Station stop. This would have significant implications for the rhythms of the journey, and the way quiet atmospheres ebbed and flowed. In particular, it would have significant implications for the spooky quiet which emerged from the dark of the evening commute.

4. For the empirical sections, we have maintained Ainsley’s first person voice to assist our storytelling in reflecting the personal and emotive fieldwork experiences which auto-ethnography brings forward. Our narrative voice reverts back to a collective group of authors in our concluding analytical comments.