The truly surreal moment of the day came when, waiting for a connection to Bristol, the announcements at Salisbury station began to be made in French. Perhaps more terrifyingly, the train turned out to be a single-carriage affair; quite a change from the eight-carriage Intercity I usually get. This was to be my transport through an hour and a half of Wessex countryside (with request stops, no less).
There is something cinematic about train journeys: the world passes by as a linear sequence of images, their progression controlled by the mechanistic director called Timetable. Villages, roads, fields, farms; office blocks, hotels, out-of-town supermarkets. The architecture of human life, inscribed on the countryside. And there are details: a crow alighting in a field; a couple on a bike ride; rusting cars and broken fences. The minutiae of our surroundings are laid bare for those who choose to look.
Many, bizarrely, don’t, choosing instead to remain immersed in newspapers, phone conversations, or the latest trashy thriller to top the bestseller lists. Personally, I cherish the opportunity a train journey gives me to do nothing and not feel guilty about it (although when I have a heavy workload, I often do spend time working rather than looking out of the window).
Train journeys afford us the chance to do other things, too. The Maori believe that we walk backwards into the future: we can see only the past, in front of us; we are blind to what will happen next. If you’re lucky, on a train you can sit facing forwards, the uncharted vista of the future spread out before you.
2 responses
I guess I’ve never taken a train into the countryside. The longest I’ve spent sitting on a train is an hour and a half local, from the airport to the stop next to my lab. Hardly a journey, but then it does take you through a variety of locales, if some of them are subterranean.
Instead, I’ve grown intimately familiar with a fifteen minute journey across the West side of Chicago. There’s few things I see that I don’t recognize immediately, but mainly I am reading an old book– Big tony’s chicken and fish shack, the unique pattern of decay in a few buildings, the thriving ironmonger in the hollowed shell of a factory. Brach’s candy plant, a red brick mountain closed a few years ago, serves as an odd reminder of a failed relationship. The towering housing projects where “Candyman” was filmed are in the final stages of being torn down.
SquidDNA April 26th, 2005
The whole of last year, I spent at least 2 hours a day commuting to and from University by car. My family and I have moved closer to Uni now so the commute is much shorter, which is good because I don’t have to wake up at 6am every weekday.
However, I do sometimes miss the long drives to and from home… although I drove the same route every day, there was something different every day. Different cars, different people, different posters, roadworks. There’s something relaxing about a long trip, something refreshing in allowing your mind to idly drink up what your eyes see.
Assimilator April 29th, 2005