The Wit’s Guide to Trains

Or, trapped in a horizontal lift

Time Transfixed, Rene Magritte, 1936.

If we didn’t keep trains around, where would Tom Cruise land his motorcycles? On a moving bus? Who would pay to see that?

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A train is “the vehicle for every kind of lament,” writes Geoff Dyer in The Last Days of Roger Federer. In the early days of rail travel, it was common to mourn the quiet countryside that had been destroyed by the thundering locomotive. Then the railway became an “attractive, decorative, and rather sedate component of the landscape it was briefly seen to ravage.” And finally we entered a prolonged period of nostalgia for the way trains used to be, before they were ruined by  “ringing phones and one-way conversation: ‘I’m on a train!’”

“A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.”
— Christopher Morley

As well as delivering goods and people to the farthest corners of the realm, early railways shipped a very clear definition of class. If you had a place to sit and a roof over your head, you were a somebody. If not, say hi to the livestock. In 1844, the British Parliament passed a law guaranteeing that third-class rail passengers “shall be provided with seats, and shall be protected from the weather.” Eventually, that led to English trains having only first and third class. And then premium economy was born.

 “If we see light at the end of the tunnel it is the light of an oncoming train.”
— Robert Lowell

Luxury train travel was pioneered by George Pullman’s eponymous company, which came up with the concept of building mahogany-encrusted rolling palaces and renting them to the railroads in the 1860s. In a nice little irony of history, the company that helped gild the Gilded Age inadvertently launched the U.S.civil rights movement by hiring huge numbers of newly freed slaves to be Pullman porters. This nascent Black middle class formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union that agitated for better working conditions. 

It was a racist custom to call all Pullman porters George, ostensibly because slaves traditionally took their master’s name. An amusing and effective campaign against this practice was called The Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George, which counted among its members King George V and George Herman “Babe” Ruth and eventually convinced the Pullman Company to display the actual names of the porters on duty in their rail cars. It was estimated that 97% of them were not named George.

“The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.”
— G.K. Chesterton

Is long-distance train travel a good way to spend your savings and vacation time? Probably not. The travel writer A.A. Gill admitted that it “sounds romantic and authentic. In reality, it’s like being trapped in a horizontal lift with 15 consumptives and an open sewer. Ask yourself: which long-distance train journey would you make in your own country for fun? So why do you think it’s going to be that much better in someone else’s?” To that end, a recent report likens taking The Canadian from Toronto to Vancouver to “being trapped on an endless red-eye.”

“Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.”
— Iris Murdoch

The very idea of strangers on a train is fraught, as the Patricia Highsmith murder mystery of that title suggests. But a famous 2014 social experiment by Nicholas Epley found that while passengers generally assume they’ll be better off not talking to anyone on the train, they’re invariably happier when they do strike up a conversation with a stranger. This research was subsequently embraced by the British, who went so far as to designate “chat coaches” on a special day in 2019.

“The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man’s taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.”
— Robert Benchley

They don’t seem to have repeated the experiment.

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“There was a Young Lady of Sweden,
Who went by the slow train to Weedon;
When they cried, ‘Weedon Station!’
she made no observation,
But she thought she should go back to Sweden
— Edward Lear

Did you know I’m in the process of threading these Wit’s Guides into a book? It’s true! But I need an opener. Help me help me!

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