How I put my life on track

Andrew Mathieson
SPITTING out a thick Glaswegian drawl, Chris McMahon has the gift of the gab – and that’s saying something.
The Geelong train conductor walks up and down carriages, clicking off tickets, checking out loos and jumping onto platforms to blow his whistle.
Forget whistling while you work, this Scotsman prefers to crack jokes at the expense of the passengers.
“I don’t know if you notice but I tend to wind everybody up,” Chris smiles.
“No one knows when I’m serious or not, especially if they don’t have enough money or can’t find their ticket.”
Standing in judgement like a discerning magistrate, he’s heard all the excuses before.
Nodding his head back and forth, “sure, sure”, Chris starts to think.
“That’s when I get my scorecard out and I mark them one to 10 to see how good the excuse is,” he says.
“Depending on how good it is, I’ll let them get away with it.”
Chris’s dry wit quickly spreads onto the PA system, like when trains have to be cleared before departure to Geelong.
For some, the call to move wears thin. Chris even recalls one traveller refusing to obey and standing his ground.
“Do you know who I am?” the man barked.
“No,” Chris replied, walking away.
The disgruntled commuter sniped back, followed Chris down the aisle and ominously repeated the question. Taking the upper hand, Chris bellowed out over the mic like a rapper punking out a rival: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen, there is a guy here who is lost – he doesn’t know who he is,” he broadcast aloud.
“If you know who he is, can you please come and claim him?”
V/Line encourages staff to engage passengers and Chris could be their most charismatic conductor yet.
In less than four years the sweet-talker has made a name for his antics on Geelong trains.
The accent is the secret behind a few laughs. On the Traralgon line Chris struggled in a barely audible voice to pronounce town names like Nar Nar Goon and Tynong.
Corio, now his home suburb, was also difficult at first for Chris.
“Of course, I kept calling it Corey-o,” he laughs.
If it’s not stumbling over the station names, it’s calling the wrong station.
They are not always honest mistakes, either.
“The announcement is always made at Lara where I say the next stop is Little River when everybody is going home to Corio, North Shore and that,” he admits.
“It puts everybody in a frenzy – they think we’re going the wrong way.
“I like to do that quite a bit.”
After toiling away in a carpet factory, pouring pots in a pub and delivering plaster, Chris finally found his real calling when he stumbled over the job while catching trains to watch his beloved Melbourne Victory.
“I found I just had the skills – it’s like working in a pub,” the former barman explains.
“I dealt with drunks and now I have to deal with passengers instead.”
Chris arrived in Australia after meeting a Geelong lass back home in a pub called Bonkers. They eventually married.
He acknowledges his working life now is better than old mates who had to check and clean Glasgow’s famous dark rail tunnels instead of riding inside.
Train stories litter Chris’s life from his days as a young boy viewing the neighbourhood station from a lounge room window.
Years later travelling three hours to work across Scotland became the daily routine – except for one memorable day.
“I used to travel with the same guy every morning,” Chris recalls.
“I would know he is getting on, so I would save a space.
“Then this one morning I was asleep and I woke up and this guy is sitting next to me naked.
“He was sleepwalking, apparently.”