Horse 1133 - This Post Stinks

Usually when I travel into the city (and out the other side) in the mornings, train carriages are filled with commuters who have freshly pressed clothes, have showered and the vast majority of them have decided to do something with regards their odours. A morning train journey is filled with its own unique set of smells.
Likewise an afternoon train journey from the other side of the city, through it and back home again, is filled with the malodourous smells of slightly disheveled people who have had a full day's work beaten out of them. Collectively the trains and buses do not smell as crisp as they did in the morning, however this is still the general smell of humanity as it goes about its business.

Over the past fortnight, I have been ungoing physiotherapy sessions following knee surgery. This has meant that I need to depart from my usual travelling times and travel in that mysterious period known as "off-peak". I have discovered that in terms of smell, this is a highly variable period indeed.

After 9am public transport generally and trains especially carry mothers and baby carriages. Suffice to say, babies themselves are a factory of random smells, producing anything from the smell of puke, to the smells of whatever they have lovingly made in their pants.
It's not just babies though, after 9am people feel as though they now have the ability to eat things exotic and ambrosial. These smells range from the sickeningly sweet, through the spices of the east and to the smells of things rotting.
You can also find a class of people who are slightly shady from about 10am. These people tend to have a habit of smelling either like stale tobacco or perhaps the new fragrance from the House of Jack Daniel's: Sour Mash Old No.7.

Trains themselves have a distinct smell. The smell of brakes on Sydney Trains is like nothing in the world. No doubt that the smell probably causes cancer, for the simple reason that everything causes cancer. Then there is the vague smell of burnt dust if you happen to be sitting in that little alcove next to the electric units directly below the pantographs.

But the scariest smell of all which can be found on public transport, are those smells floating on the breeze that you're not entirely sure of. Are they sweet? Do they smell like poo? Kebabs even? Who knows? What is certain that if you do smell them, you spend the next 25 minutes trying to work out a) what the heck they are and b) if you should be offended or not by them.