Witness account · 3 min read · Set in Calder Station ·
The Chalk Marks on the Tram Shed
A night cleaner at the old tram shed beside Calder Station finds chalk ticks on the depot doors each morning, one for every tram that did not come back in, and the number of ticks has been climbing by one every week since the line closed.
- reliability: disputed
- witness: Frank Doyle, night cleaner
I have cleaned the old tram shed at Calder Station for eleven years, since the trams were taken off the line and the sheds were turned into a bus garage with a sign on the gate that says Keep Out. The bus company does not come in much now. They have a new depot out by the bypass. So the building is mostly mine, from ten at night until six in the morning, with the pigeons in the rafters and the smell of diesel gone cold in the inspection pits.
I noticed the chalk marks in March. They were on the big double doors at the north end, the ones that used to let the trams out onto the cobbles. Each mark was a small neat tick, about the height of my shoulder, drawn in white chalk in a single stroke. There was no pattern to them. They were spaced along the bottom panel, about a foot apart, like the marks a man makes on a wall to keep track of days.
I rubbed one off with my thumb. It came away clean, like chalk does. The next morning it was back, and there was a new one beside it.
I asked the depot foreman, a man called Ray, whether he knew who was doing it. He said kids, probably. He said the bus lads had tried to get the doors painted twice and it had come up through the paint both times. He said not to worry about it.
I counted them on the Sunday. There were eleven. I counted again on the Monday, and there were twelve. I went back to the old depot logbook, which is kept in the office at the south end and has not been opened since the trams stopped running, and I found a record of every tram that had gone out from that shed on a working day. There were eleven trams that never came back. Each one had been written off the register in the same week, in the same year, 1956, after a fire in the sheds that burned for two nights and took the whole line of rolling stock with it.
I found the logbook entry for each tram. Every one had a note in the margin, in the clerk's hand, saying *not returned*.
Then I went back to the doors and counted the chalk marks one more time. There were eleven. And there was a twelfth, freshly drawn, low down on the panel where a child could reach it, the stroke still wet and bright.
I told Ray about the logbook. He went very quiet. Then he said that his father had worked the trams, and that his father used to say there was always one tram too many on the line, and that you should never count the ones that came back in the morning, because the sheds would give you an extra one to make up the difference.
The chalk marks have kept coming. Every Monday there is one more, on the north doors, always at the end of the row, always in the same white chalk. The bus company has stopped trying to paint them over. Ray says it does not matter. He says the doors will not open for the buses anyway, not since the summer. They are only waiting for the last tram to come home, and the sheds have been keeping a space for it since 1956.
I still go in at ten and clean the pits and sweep the pigeon muck off the platforms. But on Monday mornings, before I leave, I stand in front of the north doors with my broom, and count the marks, and when I have finished counting I always find that the number is one more than it was the week before, and that I am standing very close to the doors, and that somewhere on the other side, very faint, a bell is ringing once, the way a tram bell rings when it is coming in.