As I stepped off the station platform and onto the train the weather broke, for the first time in days, a week at least. The rain stopped, the wind dropped, the sun began to beat down, and I finally saw the blue sky above us. If there was ever a more definite sign that the good lord has looked down on the railways and is pleased it was at that moment.
Divine approval of train travel is of course not surprising. After all I love trains and my opinion is invariably (in my opinion) the correct one. There are of course some perfectly boring reasons to approve of trains, they are environmentally friendly, they are efficient, they are fast. I like to think that my reasons are more interesting and perhaps a bit more "poetic".
To start off though I feel I need to define my train love. It is not lust dear reader, no I am not like that lady who loves the eiffel tower or that other one where the men wanted to do cars. Nor am I a train-spotting type, sitting on platforms and noting down the technical minutiae of engines. I admit my love is somewhat practical as I don't drive and don't even have a license, but I don't hate cars and indeed look forward to the day when I can finally get that Aston Martin I've always wanted.
I think the word love is well placed though as there is definitely something romantic about train travel. This is clear to me from how ingrained the romance of the train is in our culture: from the train pulling out of the station in Murder on the Orient Express, the image of Frank Sinatra gunned down as he chases the train in Von Ryan's Express, the whole of Once Upon a Time in the West. With this is mind it is no surprise that one of the greatest film directors of the 20th century, David Lean, was always using trains in his films to great effect, A Brief Encounter, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, in all the train plays a central role.
One of my favourite films, a film directed by Lean, is Dr. Zhivago. Last year when the winter was so different than it is now and the country was blanketed by snow I took the train, as I often do, to Swansea where I grew up to see my family for Christmas. This journey is beautiful at any time of year but seeing it covered in snow, with the wind occasionally whipping up the snow into an impenetrable cloud around us, felt to me just like that moment in the movie when Zhivago and his family flee to Siberia through the harsh Russian winter. Rushing through a familiar landscape so utterly changed was exhilirating and, I don't intend this as a pun, moving.
That ability to provoke passion and drama is something I have never felt travelling going up a motorway, even though I am just a passenger and am not devoting my attention to the road. Whoever built the British road network seems to have gone out of their way to hide as much of the outside world as possible from view, which is only compounded by the fact that you are enclosed in a little steel and glass bubble. From railways you can see some of the greatest views the country has to offer and even though you are always on one track just the simple fact that you can stand up and walk about gives an extra sense of freedom and disperses the claustrophobia of the car.
In the title I also mentioned the people of trains and that is perhaps the greatest part of their charm. You meet strangers, you for a brief moment have part of their lives revealed to you. You glide through stations in the middle of cities and villages, it is the human river moving from one social vista to another. This is an experience we are all too often robbed of elsewhere as endless barriers separate us from the life of society as a whole. Indeed in our day to day lives we often find ourselves trapped simply going up and down the same roads day in and day out, to the same places, and the same people; afraid to explore beyond what we already know and trust. From the train one sees hundreds of roads.
Because of this trains are endless source of inspiration for me, I find flipping through my notebooks that nearly half of what I write I do on the train. Trains have an incredible way of opening up the mind and the soul and revealing ideas and possibilities that were previously hidden.
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