Locomotion: A life in train journeys

Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844). Joseph Mallord William Turner. National Gallery, London.

“I stood there and watched his train draw out of the station. l stared after it... until its tail light had vanished into the darkness.”

In David Lean’s film Brief Encounter (1945), from which the quote above is taken, trains are central to the drama; the story really begins when Laura and Alec first meet at a station and fall in love almost as quickly as the express trains hurtle through their local station. The trains bring them together. And in the end, trains take them away from each other, their lives altered forever.

The beauty of Lean’s film has haunted me for years, but I didn’t grow up among trains. There were cars and lorries and, above all, tractors in the Devon countryside, some of which we called “pom-poms” as they chugged like mini locomotives along nearby country roads. Trains had threatened the peace and quiet of the English countryside so much in the 19th century that George Eliot devoted a whole chapter of Middlemarch (1871-2) to her town’s debate on the subject. But by the time I started my travels, around 100 years after Eliot’s novel was published, the local trains had already been silenced by the Beeching Axe.

I grew up in a country where the state-owned British Rail was a byword for inefficiency. Then the railways were privatised. This was destined to make them both more expensive and even less reliable.

But trains were always present in my imagination, powered by books and films, such as the glossy illustrations in Wilbert Awdry’s Thomas series or the charm and pathos of the 1970 film version of The Railway Children.

I remember seeing Turner’s famous painting Rain, Steam, and Speed (shown above) on an early trip to London. Of course, growing up in South West England, I knew all about rain. But what I craved was the steam and the speed—the sheer excitement of travel by train.

I was never a trainspotter; I never wore the anorak or wrote down serial numbers of trains. I have no opinion about the use of standard gauge and cannot converse with passion about the relative benefits of steam, diesel, or electric locomotives. But from the first time the train took me away from Devon to London and then to university, I knew that they would be transformative in my life. They’ve taken me on journeys that haven’t only been across distant countries but voyages through time and other cultures.

Later, I’d live through the mixed pleasures of a slow crawl along a single-line track in the Scottish Highlands—a tiny station lit by lanterns as the snow fell—ahead of a 24-hour unheated journey home to Devon. I’d know the thrill of travelling from the Andean town of Alausí at 2,340 meters (7,680 feet) above sea level via the famous La Nariz del Diablo (Devil’s Nose) route, a rough allegretto of a descent through spectacular mountain scenery that led many hours later to the warm, exhausted oxygen-rich adagio of a slow haul along the coastal plain to the town of Durán. And years later I’d board the bullet train between Kyoto and Tokyo for the first time, savouring the unfamiliar assortment of colours and flavours of a seasonal bento perched on my table as I craned my neck for a first view of Mount Fuji.

While the British elites have decided that only motorists matter, in Japan the railway remains at the core of urban, suburban, and even rural life. So to go to see the Fuji Rock festival in the Japanese Alps, I took a train—clambering with excitement into my first double-decker carriage. To visit a tiny town in the depopulating northern prefecture of Iwate, I jumped on a Hayabusa bullet train, followed by transfer to a three-car carriage trundler that took me—along with the local schoolchildren and elders—slowly across acres of orchards, the peach blossom caressing the windows of the train as we passed, before shunting through a forest where, in a clearing, a Hooded Crane was suddenly visible alongside a small pond among the trees, a journey that made me think of the train that carries Chihiro and No-Face in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001).

And it’s probably no coincidence that one of the most famous scenes in the whole of Japanese fiction, the start of Yasunari Kawabata’s poetic masterpiece Snow Country (1947), begins with a train emerging from a long tunnel into the “snow country,” a landscape like the one I’d experienced in Scotland. Or that one of the most beloved of all children’s books in Japan is Night on the Galactic Railroad (1934) by Kenji Miyazawa.

Elsewhere, I’d get to marvel at how the French mastered high-speed trains while Britian struggled to embrace the new era of electrification; I'd be impressed at how I could leave the high-speed train station in Valencia and pass through snowy mountains in the blink of an eye. I’d travel on the oldest railway line in Africa, a colonial “gift” from the British, from Cairo to Alexandria, and enjoy the domed exuberance of the main station in the capital, the tempting glimpses of the lush green of the Nile Delta along the route, and the amiable confusion and colour of arrival in the city of Cavafy, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the fabled Pharos of Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast.

Eventually I’d also find myself lost in the crowds of Shanghai station in the run up to Chinese New Year, when the planet’s greatest human migration would begin, taking migrant workers back to their towns and villages to the north and west, or I’d share carriages with Chinese pigeon fanciers huddled over well-thumbed magazines featuring the latest breeding tips as they travelled back from releasing their birds in some distant sky.

Or I’d slide out of Hong Kong on the new fast train to Guangzhou, having crossed the border to the mainland while still at the station in Hong Kong, or cross back into England from Paris on the Eurostar, passing immigration even before departing the shattered elegance of Europe’s busiest station, the Gard du Nord. And one day I’d witness the slow haul of 200-car, two-mile-long Mexican freight trains across “El Bajío" ambling at the pace of a gentle jog on the central Mexican plateau, and with my car engine switched off, patiently sit out the ten or fifteen minutes it would take them to pass a level crossing.

Most spectacularly, I’d gaze at the summer’s ocean of grass from the Trans-Siberian Express, glimpse the hulking remains of old industrial plans and plants along the way, and feel the train shaking so loudly over the tracks on its clattering continental hurtle past Yekaterinburg at night towards Moscow that I thought we would derail.

All rail journeys come to an end, even on the circle line in London with its “long centrifugal haulage of speed” (Seamus Heaney) or on the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, whose restless orbit of the city cannot prevent me—or millions of others—from succumbing to the gravitational pull of its stops, such as Shinjuku, the world’s business station.

So while I’ve spent much of a lifetime enjoying these encounters with trains, I can’t forget that there’s always a destination, a final stop, an última parada; in Japanese, a “final point” or “shuten" (終点).

Though we sometimes call that a terminal in English, it feels too abrupt and definitive a word, freighted with foreboding. I prefer the words used in England when a train pulls in at the end of its journey; it’s more provisional and suggestive of other journeys, even hinting at metamorphosis.

“All change, please,” the announcer will say.

“All change.”