Nature of Trains

So I wrote this thing. And I think it's rather nice. And so I feel that I should share it. For those who are interested.

This may eventually be part of something longer. But for now, I think it stands rather well alone. There are some word tweaks I may do, but for now it seems like a good way to break the hiatus here.

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There is something special about trains. It’s maybe how, by their very nature, they are transitory- yet familiar. A train is a train, the whole wide world round. There is no hiding the swaying nature of a train, the faint clickity-clack that never seems to disappear from under the carriages, even long after iron wheels have fallen off, behind, out of favor and into the foggy past. A carriage may be open, with benches, or closed with cushioned seats. There will almost always be a dining car- maybe just a bar with soggy sandwiches wrapped in plastic, maybe a small restaurant with roses in china vases, silverware and deferential waiters. The lavatories will always be small and cramped, you will never get enough water out of the sinks. Conductors will always be cut of the same cloth, friendly, memorable in the moment, yet utterly forgettable; an unusual skill that, I suspect must be inherent and cannot be learned; only honed. Like the slow careful cutting of a precious gem.

We see trains in our future. Peek into science fiction and there are trains. Perhaps now they fly, perhaps they travel to different dimensions, or ever onwards towards the end. But there will always be trains- ever since the first train took a flat-bed of humans along less than a mile of track at a whopping 5 mph, trains have become ingrained in our subconscious. More so than even individual vehicles they allow us to encounter humanity. One is not apart, one cannot stop where one wills, on a train you are on a ride of destiny. You never know who will sit next to you, who will be a conversationalist and who won’t be. It’s a nearly pure sort of experience. It reminds me something of the pilgrimages of old. You didn’t get to choose your walking partners, you simple fell into step. Each time you embark on a train journey you become a character in your very own Canturbury Tales.

Humans, even the solitary ones, need (at least for a time) that crush of humanity. That reminder of otherness. Perhaps of sanity, or of the madness that exists, or that people can be decent and good, or that they can be angry loud and selfish. I think that a journey on a train allows us to see what our next steps should be, allows us to evaluate ourselves as we are crushed and combined next to some other random survey of our kind.