All Aboard

There is something so satisfying, comforting, invigorating, about taking the train. I didn’t realise this until well into adulthood, because train travel is pretty uncommon in the Prairies. These days, the trains you hear singing their haunting, echoing songs over the wheat fields or behind the slopes of sound hills are transporting grain, fuel, machinery, across the plains. Their rusting cars are branded with graffiti and stamped with the names and logos of old companies that used to mean prosperity and stability, and now speak only of a time long since past: CNR, CN, CPR.

But then I moved out east, where train travel is common, even commonplace. There are big cities and middle-sized towns and tiny villages clustered together, making train travel for people more logical, more economically viable. Because it was novel, the whole experience of taking the train was thrilling to me in a way that it very clearly wasn’t to the native-born Ontarians around me: I delighted in the charming little train stations, the clever folding down tray tables, the way the trains groaned and rattled as they gathered speed. I even liked queueing to board, my bag slung over one shoulder, and my ticket in the other hand, following the directions of grim-faced train attendants who pointed me to car three, to car four, who passed my heavy suitcase to me up the narrow stairs of the train car. But best of all, best by far, were those trips where I managed to book a window seat. The windows on the train were better than any book I had brought with me, better than listening to music, better even than imagining out a murder in car three, a la Agatha Christie, and solving it. Delicate green hills rolled passed, or blossoming orchards, or dark, foreboding stands of pine and birch, or trembling frosted bracken. Even passing through the barren grey industrial parks of the towns whose perimeters we skirted was fascinating. From those wide windows, I could catch glimpses of life - people’s backyards, littered with children’s toys or carefully tended gardens, dogs barking from behind chain link fences, the black loam of freshly turned fields, sagging dilapidated barns with sad, empty doorways and windows like eyes, crows dropping from their perches on telephone lines as the train passed, and glittering rivers with forgotten millwheels still turning steadfastly.

Of course, there are downsides - travel of just about any kind can be a faff. There was the time the train stopped on the tracks for hours because of a blizzard, the grim faces of the train attendants growing ever grimmer as the minutes ticked by and the passengers became more and more ticked off. There was something frightening, then, about looking out the window and seeing nothing but shivery white. Or the inevitable person who conducts a conversation on their phone, at full volume, announcing all their banking details and their health insurance number and their childhood dog’s name to the whole train car. Or the overpriced, half-frozen sandwiches. But on the whole, I think I prefer taking the train to just about any other method of long-distance travel. One can, after all, bring sandwiches from home, and the noisiest person in the car is a good candidate for victim number one in an imaginary murder mystery. I know I’m not alone in enjoying the train - I am joined by legions of train-spotters who delight in the details and minutiae of train schedules, machinery, tones, and stations. Perhaps they, like me, find something very satisfying in the mix of predicability and regiment of schedules and dates, arrivals and departures, timed to the minute, and the unknowable journey itself, which nearly always brings surprises. I don’t think it’s a mistake that so many stories take place on the train, or at least feature our intrepid main characters journeying from their old reality into the new via a train. Trains’ inexorable movement, fast but not too fast, comfortable but not quite home, and wide windows onto the world whipping past, makes for the perfect conveyer, setting, metaphor, and, for me, the best way to get from A to B. Safe journeys, then, to you, fellow travellers.

Jennifer