The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

3. The Pleasures of Railways

NO MODE OF TRANSPORTATION INSPIRES MORE detailed observation than the railway train. There is no literature of air travel, not much of one for bus journeys, and cruise ships inspire social observation but little else. The train is effective because anyone who cares to can write (as well as sleep and eat) on a train. The soothing and unstressful trip leaves deep impressions of the passing scene, and of the train itself. Every airplane trip is the same; every railway journey is different. The rail traveler is often companionable, talkative, even somewhat liberated. Perhaps that's because he or she can walk around. This person, this mood, is what psychologists call "untethered" — such strangers are the best talkers, the best listeners.

Train Travel — the Main Line

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories. Anything is possible, even the urge to get off. — GRB

There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express. — OPE

Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians traveled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? — OPE

Ghosts, as old people seem to the young, have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness — traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. — GTES

No good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough. — OPE

I had been in Latin America long enough to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendors of the continent. — OPE

The great challenge in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal — show up and hop on. — GTES

There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like the one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows — the branches pushed at the glass like mops and brooms — what kind of train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut. — KBS

The nostalgia of railway buffs is dangerous, since they hanker for the past and are never happier than when they are able to turn an old train into a toy. — KBS

The best story about Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third-class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, "Do you know who I am?" The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, "In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a third-class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?" — DSS

A train isn't a vehicle. A train is part of the country. It's a place. — RIR

The train offers the maximum of opportunity with the minimum of risk. — GRB

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I were on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you in awful places — afar cry from the anxious sweats of doom airplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you don't even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you can be one of those travelers who stay in motion, straddling the tracks, and never arrive or feel they ought to. — GRB

Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse.

— William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1957)

Talking on Trains

The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candor from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again. — GRB

The Romance of the Sleeping Car

The romance associated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour's succession of memorable images across a curved earth — with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea — is possible only on a train. A train is a vehicle that allows residence: dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer. — GRB

In my eyes [the berth] is the perfect thing, perfect in conception and execution, this small green hole in the dark moving night, this soft warren in a hard world.

— E. B. White, "Progress and Change,"One Man's Meat (1944)

Trains Contain the Paraphernalia of a Culture

The state railway of Thailand is comfortable and expertly run, and now I knew enough of rail travel in Southeast Asia to avoid the air-conditioned sleeping cars, which are freezing cold and have none of the advantages of the wooden sleepers: wide berths and a shower room. There is not another train in the world that has a tall stone jar in the bath compartment, where, before dinner, one can stand naked, sluicing oneself with scoops of water. Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Sri Lankan ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. — GRB

Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners on the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: "a morning pick-me-up," as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. — OPE

Particular Train Journeys

SOMERSET MAUGHAM IN THAILAND: WHY GET OFF THE TRAIN?

The train arrived at Ayudhya. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway station (after all, if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim, weary vastness of London).

— The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)

PAUL MORAND ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: PARIS TO CONSTANTINOPLE IN TWO PARAGRAPHS

The Simplon-Orient dragged its triweekly public through the gloom as usual. The usual French dressmakers and, less elderly, milliners were returning to Constantinople with a new lot of models; at La-roche the perfume of Paris began to fade and the tenacious Oriental odors, rose and peppery bergamot, reasserted themselves. Officials' wives flitted in the corridors with six infant children who wouldn't be properly put to bed this side of Bombay. Officers of the Etat-major, in police caps, strode up the station platforms during the stops, stretching their short, authoritative legs. French hearts are wholly hidden by the multitude of their decorations. The English slept late, whistled in the conveniences, where they stayed in relays until the water and towels ran out. The Israelite-Spanish families from Salonika, returning after clarifying their complexions at Vichy, kept to their bunks all day with their clothes on, stretched on the unmade bedding, between swaying flasks of Chianti hung from the electric light fixtures. Then after a tedium they and the rest of us slept to the rattle of the axles and the steel castanet springs. Snores. We beat on the mahogany panels to drive back the bedbugs. The conductor snoozed at the end of the corridor, on a cushion stuffed with contraband lire, dinars, drachmas, Rumanian leis and pounds, his alpaca tunic stuffed also with little folded papers full of jewels.

The train shook the loose glass of Gothic Swiss railway stations. For twenty-nine minutes the Simplon offered its large iron symphony. Then the banked roads and rice fields of the Piedmont. Then a station leading off into nothing, a great cistern of silence and shadows that was Venice. In the morning a zinc-colored north wind overbent the Croatian corn in the plains. Pigs, striped black and white as with racing colors, betrayed the presence of Serbia; they were apparently devouring the corpse, or rather the wheels and an alarm signal, of a car which lay still derailed in a ditch. After rivers came yet other rivers that we crossed on rickety trestles beside the ruined piers of older bridges which had been destroyed in retreats. At Vinkovci we got rid of the velvet Rumanians, velvet eyes, velvet mustaches, daughters in undershirts plaiting their hair in the gelid darkness by the glimmer of half-frozen candles. After Sofia, pimentos hung drying across the house fronts. Oriental sun beat upon the Bulgar plains, ox-ploughs obtruded a symbolic prosperity as depicted upon the Bulgars' postage stamps and their money. At last, after the desert of Thrace, under a sky full of constellations lacking a polestar, with the disfigured Bear no longer recognizable at the low edge of the horizon, the Sea of Marmara stretched before us through a breach in the Byzantine wall.

— "Turkish Night,"Fancy Goods — Open All Night (1922), translated by Ezra Pound

REBECCA WEST EN ROUTE TO YUGOSLAVIA

I raised myself on my elbow and called [to my husband] through the open door into the other wagon-lit: "My dear, I know I have inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear, once we are in Yugoslavia."

There was, however, no reply. My husband had gone to sleep. It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to justify my certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.

— Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941)

JEAN COCTEAU SUFFERING FROM BOMBAY TO CALCUTTA

Intolerable porters demand additional tips. Passepartout [Cocteau's lover, Marcel Khill] threatens them. They run off but return and glue their faces at the windows of the dining car, where one can just manage to collapse — it's the only word — into the seats one each side of the table.

I had no idea that such heat existed and that people could live in this cursed zone. The train starts off, and as we move out, I can recognize the old cannons on which Kim sat astride at the beginning of the book. [The cannon, Zamzama, was actually in Lahore, but this is a detail.]

The fire in India burns the glass, metal and coachwork to a white heat, raises the temperature of the atmosphere till you feel sick despite the electric fans which whip up its sticky paste.

Not having been warned against this torture, we leave the windows open. We doze off and wake up covered with a grey crust and our mouths, ears, lungs, hair full of the ashes of the fire which surrounds our journey. This inferno with insignificant interruptions of douches of cold water which quickly turn into boiling water, and lumps of ice that melt and become hot water, was to be the only knowledge of India vouchsafed to Mr. Fogg and Passepartout…

Nothing stirs. Corn, paddy fields, mud village, agricultural labor of the damned souls in this hell. Turquoise blue and blackjays, occasional coconut palms and trees with fine luscious shadows begin to reappear. Sometimes a deodar stands alone in the desert dealing justice.

Stations. Shirts with tails hanging loose. Umbrellas. Workmen washing and massaging themselves with their fists. Then they stamp on their linen robes and wring them. And the never-ending procession of women beasts of burden. Blind men led by children. The heat is becoming less intolerable. By night it is almost cool. Tomorrow the inferno will be redoubled.

— Mon Premier Voyage (1937), published in English as My Journey Around the World, translated by W. J. Strachan (1959)

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LEAVING HOME: "AT EVERY STATION I WAS ON THE POINT OF GETTING OFF"

From Nogent to Paris. What a ride! I closed the windows (I was alone in the compartment), held my handkerchief to my mouth, and wept. After a time, the sound of my own voice… brought me to myself, then the sobs began again. At one point my head was spinning so that I was afraid. "Calm down! Calm down!" I opened the window; the moon, surrounded by a halo of mist, was shining in puddles; it was cold. I thought of my mother, her face all contracted from weeping, the droop at the corners of her mouth…

At Montereau I went into the station restaurant and drank three or four glasses of rum, not to try to forget things, but just to do something, anything.

Then my misery took another form: I thought of returning. (At every station I was on the point of getting off; only the fear of being a coward prevented me.) I imagined the voice of Eugenie, crying, "Madame! It's Monsieur Gustave!" I could give my mother this tremendous joy at once; it was up to me entirely. I lulled myself with this idea: I was exhausted, and it relaxed me.

— Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV IN 1909: "INFORMAL CONTACT BETWEEN TRAIN AND CITY"

When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed house fronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a two-fold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses.

— "First Love,"Nabokov's Dozen (1958)

V. S. PRITCHETT: "LARGE THICK COLD OMELETS"

Usually I traveled second or third class on the Spanish trains, for there the Spanish crowd came in and were good company. Often the women traveled with a pet bird in a cage: everyone took their shoes off and when they unpacked their large thick cold omelets, they were careful to offer it first to everyone in the carriage. At the stations, which were often a couple of miles from the towns they served, water sellers calling out "Agua fresca" walked up and down in the red dust of the south and the pale dust of Castile.

— The Spanish Temper (1954)

EVELYN WAUGH ON THE TRAIN TO NAIROBI: "MY ILL TEMPER GRADUALLY COOLED"

But my ill temper gradually cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombassa and Nairobi), climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat opposite a young lady who was on her way to be married. She told me that she had worked for two years in Scotland Yard and that had coarsened her mind; but since then she had refined it again in a bank at Dar-es-Salaam. She was glad to be getting married as it was impossible to obtain fresh butter in Dar-es-Salaam.

I awoke during the night to draw up my blanket. It was a novel sensation, after so many weeks, not to be sweating. Next morning I changed from white drill to gray flannel. We arrived in Nairobi a little before lunch time.

— Remote People (1931)

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS: A MOSLEM FAMILY IN THE COMPARTMENT

At the foot of the Kashmir mountains, between Rawalpindi and Peshawar, the archaeological site of Taxila lies a few kilometers from the railway line. I went there by train, which led to my being the involuntary cause of a minor drama. There was only one first-class compartment of a fairly old type — sleep four, seat six — simultaneously reminiscent of a cattle truck, a drawing room and — because of the protective bars on the windows — a prison. A Moslem family was already in possession, when I got in: a husband, with his wife and two children. The lady was in purdah: although she made an attempt to isolate herself by crouching down on her bunk wrapped in her burkah and with her back obstinately turned towards me, the promiscuity eventually appeared too shocking and the family had to split up. The wife and children went off to the "Ladies Only" compartment, while the husband continued to occupy the reserved seats and to glare at me. I managed to take a philosophical view of the incident.

— Tristes Tropiques (1955), translated by John and Doreen Weightman

SIMENON: THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY

That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine. Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer, vaguely improper notions into his head.

— The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (1938), translated by Marc Romano and D. Thin

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: TO ARACATACA WITH HIS MOTHER

We were the only passengers, perhaps in the entire train, and so far nothing had been of any real interest to me. I sank into the lethargy of Light in August, smoking without pause, but with occasional, rapid glances to identify the places we were leaving behind. With a long whistle the train crossed the salt marshes of the swamp and raced at top speed along a bone-shaking corridor of bright red rock, where the deafening noise of the cars became intolerable. But after about fifteen minutes it slowed down and entered the shadowy coolness of the plantations with discreet silence, and the atmosphere grew denser and the ocean breeze was not felt again. I did not have to interrupt my reading to know we had entered the hermetic realm of the banana region.

The world changed. Stretching away on both sides of the track were the symmetrical, interminable avenues of the plantations, along which oxcarts loaded with green stalks of bananas were moving. In uncultivated spaces were sudden red brick camps, offices with burlap at the windows and fans hanging from the ceilings, and a solitary hospital in a field of poppies. Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.

— Living to Tell the Tale (2004), translated by Edith Grossman

JAN MORRIS: ALTERCATION ON THE ZEPHYR

I had pleasant companions at breakfast on the California Zephyr — a girl from Fresno who had never been on a train before, and two railroad buffs who kept me informed about the state of the track. However, I did have one altercation in the dining car. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs I was told that I was entitled to one or the other but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, but I did not get far. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: "You're not from this country. You don't understand the lingo." But the girl from Fresno thought the man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me — only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper's Oxford Marmalade.

— Contact! A Book of Encounters (2010)

Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding

In terms of travel, Henry Fielding was, as a youth, a student at the the University of Leiden, and after he earned a law degree in London he became a circuit judge. His life (1707–1754) was short and turbulent, but he was productive, first as a writer of satirical plays, and after these were declared unlawful he wrote political pamphlets and the great novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). His ill health burdened him: he suffered from asthma, liver disease, gout, and dropsy (edema), which he refers to repeatedly in his Voyage to Lisbon. I feel that his illnesses heightened his sensibilities and contributed to his close observation and the bite of his satire. He set sail for Lisbon looking for health, but the meandering voyage sickened him further and he died soon after he arrived. These paragraphs are from his Voyage to Lisbon, which was published the year after his death.

***

There would not, perhaps, be a more pleasant, or more profitable study, among those which have their principal end in amusement, than that of travels or voyages, if they were writ, as they should be, and ought to be, with a joint view to the entertainment and information of mankind. If the conversation of travelers be so eagerly sought after as it is, we may believe their books will be still more agreeable company, as they will, in general, be more instructive and more entertaining.

***

If the customs and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be no office so dull as that of a traveler: for the difference of hills, valleys, rivers; in short, the various views in which we may see the face of the earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of his labour…

***

To make a traveler an agreeable companion to a man of sense, it is necessary, not only that he should have seen much, but that he should have overlooked much of what he hath seen. Nature is not, any more than a great genius, always admirable in her productions, and therefore the traveler, who may be called her commentator, should not expect to find everywhere, subjects worthy of his notice.