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particularly visible. Like much colonial engineering, its purpose was function over form, efficiency over empathy. Yet over time, the city adapted around it. Or perhaps more accurately, people made lives in the spaces that were left behind.
Houses crept closer to the tracks. Then closer still. Generations grew up in these narrow dwellings where the railway was not a boundary but a neighbour. By the mid-20th century, the area had become home to railway workers and their families, and life unfolded in the shadow— sometimes within inches— of passing trains. Children played along the line. Meals were prepared in doorways that opened almost directly onto the tracks. Laundry hung overhead in a patchwork of colour and fabric, swaying gently until the rush of a train sent it snapping in the wind.
For the people who lived here, the railway was not an attraction. It was a rhythm. They knew the schedule not by checking a clock, but by instinct, by vibration, by the subtle cues that signalled a train’ s approach. When it came, life paused just long enough to let it pass. Then
the railway was a rhythm, schedule was an instinct, a vibration, a subtle cue
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