Plank road table

Harry Morris

“The City Beach plank road was referred to as the Switchback. It didn’t switch the way the railway line at Kalamunda switched but it was up and down, up and down. I can remember hitting eighty mile an hour on that road. It was just single track you had to have faith that you didn’t meet anyone coming the other way. When you came over each hill there was a little siding that you could stop and move over. It had been put there for horses and carts. With the coming of motor vehicles people became more impatient and there was just as much road rage in 1930 as there is today, relatively speaking. There were no rules as to which driver would get off. Sometimes you met in between and someone had to back up.”