Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Calder ·
Schedule of the Last Tram, Clarified
A transport board minute keeps reinserting the deleted 03:33 tram item, so the clerk files the reprint history instead of the schedule.
- filed: "At the ordinary meeting, first sitting"
- reference: "CB/TR/07"
- status: folklore
1. Filed by the minutes clerk of the Calder Transport Board, Sarel Coumbe, in the first sitting of the ordinary meeting, at the direction of the Chair, who has asked for a plain account of what happened to item 12 on the running schedule and has also asked that the account not contain the word again, which I have agreed to and will not. My part in this is small and careful. I take the minutes. This file is the record of how the minutes disagreed with me.
2. For the reviewer's orientation: the Board meets monthly in the hearing room on Ferry Road. The winter running schedule was laid in November and carried. It contained, as all Calder schedules have contained since the war years, an item for the last tram of the Thin Hour, the 03:33 from the pier head, circled in the timetable, manned by a volunteer driver who is paid a dark bonus and never named in staff lists. Item 12 is that tram. Nobody proposed removing item 12. That is the first fact, and I ask the reviewer to hold it.
3. In February the printed minutes went out, and item 12 stood in them as carried. The Chair read the proof against my draft himself and found nothing amiss. Then Councillor Breem, who has sat on the Board forty years, wrote in to say he must have missed the motion that deleted item 12, and asked for the corrected sheet, because his own copy of the printed minutes did not have item 12 in it at all.
4. My draft has item 12. The proof has item 12. The print order for the February minutes has item 12 on the page proof, and the printer's bill charges for the column it sits in. Two hundred and forty copies were struck. Of those copies, as they reached the members' hands and the public reading room, item 12 is gone. Not struck through. Not overprinted. The column closes cleanly and the running order jumps from the 01:50 to the 05:15, and the pagination is continuous, and no blank line stands where the tram used to be. It is as if the item was never set, and the same plates that set it in the works produced copies without it.
5. Suspicion settled where suspicion always settles, on the print works, and the works manager opened his files to me personally. The reprints tell the story I am now filing. The February minutes were reprinted twice: once the same week, for members who said their copies were misbound, and once in March, after the public reading room's copy was returned with pages sticking. Both reprints were struck from the same standing plates. Both reprints contain item 12 in full. But the reprint histories, when the members wrote back with what they held, do not run the way plates run. Nine members returned reprint two with item 12 missing. Four members returned reprint one with item 12 present. Two members hold reprint one with it gone and reprint two with it back. The history does not run from present to absent. It runs both ways, and every copy is honestly dated and honestly delivered.
6. The Chair ordered the deletion motion entered and carried in April, so the matter would be settled: item 12, the 03:33, removed from the schedule, the motion moved by Breem, seconded, carried without dissent. I minuted it. The May schedule went to print without item 12. The May minutes record the schedule carrying without item 12. In June the Board's own circular to drivers, printed from the Board's own stencil in the Clerk's office, lists the Thin Hour tram as running, dark bonus attached, and the drivers to whom I showed it said they had signed the March duties and taken the money, and one of them asked me, politely, when the June motion voiding the June motion would come before us.
7. This is what I can file. I cannot file the motion that keeps reappearing, because no motion is before us. I am instructed to re-print the schedule clarifications quarterly until the item stands deleted in every copy in circulation, and each quarter I certify the deletion, and each quarter a copy surfaces somewhere in the district with item 12 restored, always honestly printed, always from our own stencils. My draft of these minutes has the certifying clause in it. I am putting that sentence here to see, when the proof comes back, whether it is still in this file.