I once had to sit quietly, in the heat and the dust and the hot wind and wait a long time for a train.

My mum and sister were passengers and they had been away for about 3 weeks.

To an 8-year-old, 3 weeks felt like forever.

A tiny train station with a tiny platform, on the outskirts of our tiny dirt road town.

Its main purpose was for long, brown coal trains – loaded up with sparkly, black coal to be switched from one rail track to the next as they clickety clacked their way through the village in the dead of the night, shaking all the houses in their rows.

The small yellow bricked train station was also sparingly used as a lightning fast whistle stop, for locals to hurl themselves and their weathered possessions on or off the incoming or outgoing train as fast as they could, before it churned itself along to bigger towns and bigger platforms.