I really like the Kam Sheung Road KCR station. The picture I took there on my camera phone Friday would tell you why, supposing I could figure out how to get it onto my computer.
What appeals about this place is a confluence of factors I find satisfying in ways that are easy to write down but probably impossible to communicate. They are, not in any order, its newness, its bigness, its unlikely location, and the lighting out at the bus stops and taxi rank.
The KCRC decided to build their new line (the Westrail) according to some arcane business formula that no-one else understands, or perhaps a genetic train-set impulse among the planners that needed to fill a space on the map with a railway. Who knows? The result is a string of vast, shiny, new stations flung out across the New Territories, the elevated track snaking and stiltwalking for miles above village houses and car wrecking yards and semi abandoned fields. People out here work out here. They don't go places, and why should they? They have what they want right here.
Kam Sheung Road station is the jewel in the crown of this lovely, pointless enterprise. It sits in an undistinguished bend of the Shek Kong valley, not particularly close to, nor far away from, the partially mothballed army base. For me it's perfect. If I have to go to Tuen Mun- some people sometimes have to go to Tuen Mun- then I can take a 64k bus from outside my house in Tai Po, get off at Kam Sheung, walk through the silent white hall past three pristine, shrink-wrapped 7-11s, without the slightest danger of barging another passenger. It's like a KCR station for future humans who have found peace at the edge of the galaxy. After drifting serenely up a noiseless escalator, I can climb aboard a near empty train, and doze happily for 20 minutes to the terminus.
May I offer two facts to try and lay out for you the curious nature of this new line?
1. After Kam Sheung Road, which is in the heart of the New Territories, the route swerves violently back into Kowloon by ways not fully understood but surely involving miles of new tunnel, skilfully avoids hooking up to the MTR system at somewhere logical and useful like Tsuen Wan, and ends in a broken backed manner in another new station on a stretch of waterfront between two container terminals and separated from human habitation by acres of dog haunted empty lots.
2. The trains are so underused that they've shortened them. If you are absent i nthe mind, like me, you'll often find yourself standing at the end of the platform as the shortened train slides by, coming to rest three or four car-lengths further up.
But it's when you arrive at Kam Sheung at night, on your way home, that the real charm of the place becomes clear. Waiting at the bus stop, you can't quite put your finger on it. There's something there, above you. Something warming and benign. After a while you get it. Above the pool of lamplight over the (vast) parking lot, it's dark. The sky is not the buzzing orange grey of Central or Kowloon. You are in the country side. That doting presence is the easy dark sky. It's the universe gathered round. It gives Kam Sheung Road the comforting, lonely/ welcome feel of a rural gas station or a motorway service stop.
I'll try to post that photo.
