It was in the mid 80s. We were living in Molo town.
My father used to work for some Singh guy who ran a recovery service: huge ass breakdowns, and also owned some garage.
My mother worked at Molo Nursing home, a small cottage hospital located in the town.
Molo was a quaint little town, a sweet place to live, and we had quite some good time there.
We lived in some mansion just opposite the gate to Molo primary, now Molo academy which was at that time a very good school. It was a public school but it drew its students from all demographics. Mostly the local entrepreneurs and working class people brought their kids there. Most of the farmers around also brought their kids there.
Molo was a boom town at that time, a major centre for pyrethrum production milk production, a potato research and processing centre and a major stop on the railway line.
Many times we would go down to the train station and take a train to either Nakuru or Kisumu for short vacations. It was quite an existence.
So as kids, we used to play this dangerous game sometimes, for those who were courageous enough, we’d go down past the KCC plant, then take a path adjacent to it to the railway line.
Right at the bottom, where your path crossed the railway, to the right, in about 300 meters, it came to the train station, then crossed the road, and zig zagged itself across the landscape, on its way to Nakuru and the rest of the country. It lay there like a snake, lying on the green grass, basking in the sun.
Cross the railway line and continue on the path, and you would come down upon a stream, always with sparkling clean water, jump across it and you would come down to the hospital mortuary, up the hill were an Anglican and a Catholic church, standing their in all their majesty.
But I digress, so we would walk down to the railway line with my friends, turn left at the intersection, and walk along the railway line to where it took a few bends along the line. So that you could not see far along the railway line.
We would wait along the line, at the bends for the Kisumu train, which would pass these around 11 am.
We used to lie between the two rails, still in an almost hypnotic state and the poor driver, if he ever saw us, was too late to apply brakes, and the train was leaving the station and still trying to gather speed.
We would come out of the train, the last wagon, I think it always purple. Having passed.
One time however, the driver applied brakes, and stopped right over our heads, and we had to scramble away from the railway police.
We eventually moved out, and one time, decades later, I was doing some travelling, and happened to stay in Molo at the time, that changed my life, and its meaning…
3 Likes
Upuss wa insha
mwalimu @highschooler na ule mwingine mkamba mark hii
si.somangi vitu refu refu
Nice grammar. Complete the hekaya
it was a rite of passage area hizo mpaka rongai…the daring!
http://www.mcrr.org/IMAGES/RollingStock/cabooseOut.jpg
Caboose (in Kenya called guard), and the colour was maroon, not purple…
Great read!
si mbaya
Good read but This is not possible…What of that thing at the front of the Engine wagon that has a grader like shovel for clearing debris on the rail?