Train Tales

A double feature this week with a couple of observational bits written on a trip to Leeds and back, starring one of my favourite trains: the Trans-Pennine Express. Why is it a favourite? Well I get it a lot and I've got to assume whoever named the line is Kraftwerk fan. Plus the service is generally decent.

Trans-Pennine Express 02/09/12

The iPod cut out. What had once been the soothing sounds of Belle & Sebastian were transformed first to silence and then, more gradually, to the lilting vague conversation of the carriage which moves along in time with the rocking of the train and clank of the points.

He fumbled with the aging music box, desperately trying to return his distraction. But the electronics inside were as unresponsive to his wishes as the machine’s case suggested. What had once been gleaming pure blackness with a bright silver-white apple on its back had faded with the years and was now dull, chipped and scratched.

Against his wishes the sounds of the carriage filled his ears and then his mind. Two pockmarked teenage boys argued loudly over the benefits of orcs, whilst the Chinese girl sat next to them avoided the conversation through the intense study of an empty Burger King bag.

Behind her the fat belly of a man clad in neckbeard and taut My Little Pony T-shirt collided sporadically with the clear Perspex wall separating the seats from the doors. This slapping provided strange irregular percussion to the group of rugby fans who loudly and drunkenly carried the chants they had collected in the stands of Warrington and Saint Helens back with them across the hills.

One of the teenage boys desperately covered his mention of Thomas the Tank Engine by reference to an apocryphal nephew, the fat brony glared.

The iPod sputters back into life.

Trans-Pennine Express 03/09/12

Despite the people the train seems empty of life as it races through the dark and seemingly endless hills where in the gloom the distinction between track and tunnel becomes philosophical to all but the driver. What life there is in here moves so slow as to be almost indiscernible.

A couple are on their way to Huddersfield and then from to their homes in the hills above. Both she and he are worn down by years of weather and drink. She pulls out her phone and finds someone to give her a lift from the station; he feels an aching pain stir in a long broken heart.

Two men from the east of Europe munch on burgers and between bites of waking with the crack of dawn and the dreams they share of an imagined America, the hope that it proves better than the reality found in Britain. There words are whispered delicately as if in fear that should any other hear yet another fragile illusion will be smashed.

Only two others sit in this carriage. One taps and pecks absentmindedly at the screen a glossy red pad, I scribble and scrawl in a beaten black notebook.

The guard walks in then she yawns loudly and stretches against the door, paying no regard to tickets. In the blackness the Trans-Pennine Express rolls on.