Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Fenchurch Street ·
Why the Last Tram on Fenchurch Street Returns Empty Each Autumn
The final working of the season is booked with one fare aboard, the gate photograph shows nobody, and the depot files the prints in order.
- status: rumor
They will tell you the Fenchurch line gives up its last service on the night the clocks go back, and that the service is not on the board. This is so. The summer sheet carries the line from the grain to the clocks, twenty-two minutes of streets, the hosiery works to Friarsgate, and on the last evening of it there is a final working: the 22:47 out of Friarsgate, down to the shed. The board does not hold it. The board has been asked, twice, by men with greater patience than duty, and the answer that came up from the depot office was one line, that the closing working is kept by the shed and shown by the shed, and there the matter has rested for a long time.
Every car that comes onto the rails at the shed is photographed, and has been photographed since the shed was built. The gate camera takes the car in the gate light, broadside, for the rolling stock record. Any other night of the year the print goes to the file that goes to any other print. On the closing working, the print is not filed with the others. It goes into a grey folder marked Season End, one envelope to each autumn, and the envelopes have been going in, in order, for longer than the men who post them have been on the shed.
The fare is the other half of it. The fare box of a closing working is counted by itself, before the season's tally, and every autumn the count comes to one adult fare. Ask what the fare was paid in and you will be told the truth of it, which is that nobody asks twice, because the answer is a coin of the old weight, the token the machines stopped taking twenty years back, and the machine prints one ticket to the token and stands there holding it. The ticket has never been claimed out of the tray. It is still in the tray at the season count, printed, unstamped, and folded once along its perforation, and the men who count it put it in the folder with the print and enter one fare in the season's book, and their hands are steady.
What the season's book shows, after that entry, is level. It was level before, it is level after; the line took what the line took, and the closing working carries one fare that no seat in the photograph was carrying. The photograph shows the car standing in the gate light with every lamp lit and the swing of nothing at any window. No silhouette. No shape at the glass. The flat of the pole mirror catches the ceiling light and gives it back. The men who keep the folder have married the two records without remark: the count is kept in the office, the picture is kept in the folder, and neither has been known to differ from the other in twenty-nine autumns. One fare, one empty car, one envelope a year.
Enid Slade worked the Fenchurch line thirty-one years and drew the closing working nineteen times, and she will tell you what the men will not: that she never once had to say fares please. Her gong bell at the salt gate answered her goodnight the one year she gave one, and she put the echo down to the works wall, the works wall being plain brick on both sides, and she did not repeat the goodnight. She is at the shelter at Friarsgate most mornings, painting the seat, and she does not take the token question further than the tray.
Nobody at the depot will say which of the two records is trusted, the coin in the box or the seats in the picture, and it is known that the coin has never come up short of the print nor the print short of the coin. The season carries its one fare and closes level, and the folder takes its envelope with the rest. The question that travels with it, from conductress to night men and back, is not the photograph and not the folder. It is this: paid by whom, at 22:47, and for the going or for the coming back.