Bermuda [antikvár]

Introduction?fy Sy/via ShortoThe Bermuda Railway running along East Broadway to the city of Hamilton in the 1930s.F^ VERY SUNDAY AFTERNOON for years my father and a group of his friends met to go alking. They wanted to be out in the Bermuda countryside, with its soft air and wide ^ blue skies, the perfect antidote to a working week in the oííice. Dressed in shorts and floppy cricket hats, sporting walking sticks and knobbly knees, they strode off paved roads and onto dusty white farm tracks and little-known woodland paths. Their walks almost always included a part of the route once taken by the old Bermuda Railway.Cars and motorbikes now think they own the road, but in quieter days, Bermuda did not allow cars at all, except for a few official vehicles. You traveled by bike, on foot, or in a horse and buggy. For a short while there was a motor bus, the Scarlet Runner, but it frightened the horses. Then they built the railway.The Bermuda Railway was like a bridge in time, spanning the island's past and the modern age. It was an eccentric two-carriage shuttle, a strange conveyance that looked like an enormous truck. It ran the length of the island, from the old capital, St. George's, in the East End, through the newer city of Hamilton in the middle of the island, and on to Somerset in the west. Its tracks have long since been torn up, its rolling stock sold; but in the Roaring Twenties, when tourism in Bermuda really was roaring because of Prohibition in the United States (which was unthinkable in Bermuda), better public transport had to be planned to get people safely about. The railway opened in 1931, after almost ten years of legislating, negotiating, and tunneling. It was a veiy good idea, comfortable and convenient. People used the railway. It stopped at places where you would want to get off, like the aquarium or the hospital or the Front Street shops in Hamilton. First-class passengers rode in splendid wicker chairs, like the ones at home on their porches, while second-class passengers perched on wooden benches. Tradesmen obligingly sent packages out from town to a customer's nearest stop in the country. Many people took their bicycles with them in the