Unlike most Americans my age, I actually have a lot of experience with trains. When I was five and six I made the trip numerous times between my grandparents in Arizona and my home in New Orleans. Last year I rode China’s bullet trains all over. My great grandfather was even a railroad conductor and head of the union. I remember his photo on my grandmother’s living room mantle-piece, standing straight in front of his train. I heard the train still exists, probably resting on retired tracks in an overgrown field outside of Duluth.
Whatever experience or family lineage I may have, riding in this sleeper compartment is an original experience. I’m alone, where I can contemplate, and for once I’m not wholly focused on how many more hours I‘ll be sitting up. This specific train--a leftover from the Soviet Union I suspect--is old, heavy, and tired. It brutishly thunders ahead. Still, upon setting my mattress and pillow, stale-smelling and slightly damp though they were, I found myself giddy. The train, I have quickly decided, is the perfect way to travel.
Watching Moldova’s green hills under dark clouds pass me by--beautiful, but not unique--I considered some different explanations for why this train and I are such fast friends. Psychologically speaking, one must note the train’s phallic shape, which has served as a useful metaphor for men before me--opening Renoir’s The Human Beast and comically closing Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. I suppose this is the kind of sub-conscious association that might draw a young man. But this wouldn’t be unique to trains of course, considering Boeing jets and submarines. There is simply a coincidence of anatomy, psychology, and aerodynamics in the universe.
Another possibility is that my sleeping compartment, population me, is the only form of transportation I know where I don’t have to deal with other people. My disinterest in strangers makes this a big plus. But I don’t seek solitude. In fact I’d pay exorbitant amounts if it meant I could choose any one of several friends to accompany me on this train.
Nope. The locomotive is just the best metaphor.
Cars confer a false sense of power, an illusion of agency. The driver controls speed and direction; jostles for favorable position; secretly races opponents; tries to make “good time.” Generations of muscle cars, or worse--Hummers--express what shiny armor might have five hundred years ago. Hybrids aren’t much better--yes, with incremental baby steps you can save the world. This cannot represent life, with GPS systems like prophets, lifeless and all-knowing. One would have to include a lot more drunk drivers and runaway brake pads.
Buses are simply too uncomfortable to be a favorite mode of travel, regardless of any usefulness in analogizing life.
Flying is too far the opposite of driving, divorcing the traveler from the journey. The change of location is abstract, not experienced. For people in a hurry it’s perfect, but that’s not how people live their lives. No one actually wants to arrive at their final destination.
The train, or maybe this train in particular, is different. You have freedom. To sit, sleep, or go to the dining and lounge cars with other warm-bodies, a mix of solitude and community at the discretion of the passenger. But this free will is bound within larger constraints. You don’t control the speed, and the train will get there when it gets there. One can feel the bumps of the journey, but it’s not unpleasant. It even sounds a rhythm, mimicked in the big band jazz standards I played in high school. The train lulls and slumbers, while its passengers sit, talk, think, and wait.
P.S. Several hours after writing the above paragraphs, I was joined by four Moldovan hooligans. For three hours their drinking and laughing kept me awake. I didn’t say anything, only tried to communicate my contempt with vain body language. Not speaking Russian was one problem; being outnumbered was another; the decisive factor was probably cowardice.
It reminded me that the unfortunate problem with trains, for me, is the other people who ride them. It’s elitist and prejudiced to say so, but not inaccurate. How I wish I could have traveled by train a hundred years ago or more, when it was the choice mode of travel for the cultured and well-behaved. I suppose there would have been train robberies to worry about, but at least that would leave a better story than four Moldovans drinking wine from a two liter bottle in my sleeping compartment.
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