If there is a greater thrill of travelling than the discovery of unfamiliar places, for me it’s getting there by train
Excerpt from and AEON Essay by Margarita Gokun Silver
The moment I step inside Puerta de Atocha – Madrid’s central railway station – I feel a familiar pang of excitement. My heart flutters, my pulse speeds, and my mood goes up a few points, much the same way that the outside temperature climbs when the sun peeks from the clouds. I am not here to greet a long-lost friend, to rendezvous with a lover, or to embark on a journey on my bucket list. I am here to take a routine, two-and-a-half hour train ride to Barcelona, for a work assignment. Yet suddenly I am happier than I’d been only a few minutes ago. Inexplicably happier.
If there is a greater thrill of travelling than the discovery of unfamiliar places, for me it’s getting there by train. Atocha isn’t the only station that turns me into a five-year-old about to unwrap a present. Over the past 40 years, I’ve boarded trains in Tashkent, Munich, St Petersburg, Bangkok and Boston and, to this day, every time I stand on a platform, I smile. When I mention this curious fact to my friends, many nod in agreement. ‘I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it,’ wrote Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), his first in a series of books dedicated to rail journeys. So what is it that draws us to train travel?
My own love affair with trains began while I was still in kindergarten. Every August since the age of five, together with my parents, I boarded a long-distance express named Sochi. It left Moscow daily at 11:59pm for a 30-hour journey that connected the capital of the then Soviet Union to Sochi, a city on the Black Sea coast. Our destination was Tuapse, a smaller town and an intermediary station on the train’s trajectory. My father’s parents lived there.
While a month-long vacation at their house was always a treat – lazy days at the beach and my grandmother’s cooking among the definite highlights – what I really looked forward to was the train. To spend two nights and a day lounging around on a bunk while eating picnic-type food packed by my mother, looking out of the window at the changing landscape and listening to strangers’ stories fascinated me equally, both as a young child and, later, a teenager.
‘If you like travel, it’s not just about the destination, it’s about the journey,’ says Mark Smith, who after years of working in the railway industry created Seat61, a website that helps travellers plan train trips. ‘The journey itself has value,’ he continues. ‘I think the food equivalent [of the opposite view] would be “I don’t care what my food tastes like, I just want to stuff my face.” Can you imagine telling a famous chef that? Well, telling me “I don’t care about the journey and I just want to get there” is a bit like telling me that.’
When Smith started the site, the typical users were either people with a phobia of flying or those who already knew they liked trains. In the past few years, however, that demographic has changed. Now the site attracts more and more travellers who’ve grown frustrated with the experience of air travel. Disenchanted with subhuman treatment by the airlines and exasperated at the time vortex of delays, cancellations and security procedures, they want something less stressful and more comfortable. But ease isn’t the only thing they find. ‘Once they try it [travelling by train], it’s like having a whole new door open in their world, a door to a whole new world,’ Smith says.
Get the entire essay on AEON
