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.

Trains and the People Who Use Them

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.