Reflections on World Travel

I Thank You God For Most This Amazing Train

With humble apologies to e.e. cummings for the hijack

Trains ply through cities, mountains, and sprawling countryside as we look out the window to catch a glimpse into other people’s lives.

I was at something of a loss last month when the Globetrotters’ writing prompt involved ghost sightings and similarly spooktacular events. My experiences with the supernatural are far and few between, other than that crazy-ass recurring dream about forgetting to attend a math class for an entire semester of grad school! Scary… but not ghostly.

Come November with a prompt related to gratitude for travel and I could submit a new post every day for an entire month. Traveling the globe has most certainly been a most influential element of the person I am today, and life can scarcely get better than when traveling on a train.

As I write this, I’m sitting aboard the Eurostar, racing across the plains of southern England, just minutes from entering the Channel Tunnel that will take me to continental Europe where I will meet my daughter in Brussels. I am all at once dazzled by the technology of this aerodynamic tube on wheels as we glide along at about 150 miles per hour. Meanwhile, just outside my window is the British countryside, adorned with expansive meadows punctuated by a distant village every now and again. Unlike the Easyjet alternative, the carbon footprint of my three-hour journey is next to nothing.

While I am, indeed, thankful for this particular train, my gratitude at this moment entails a much grander and sweeping statement for all the trains I have ridden over the years. In the pun division of dad joke distribution, I think it’s rather humorous that this person who typically writes about naturist travel is also… wait for it… a train buff!

My affections for train travel date back to my adolescent years when I would catch the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Oakland, California up to central Oregon where my brother was attending college at the time. By high school, those trips were overshadowed by several coast-to-coast journeys by train, across the Great Salt Lake before playing tag with Interstate 70 through the Glenwood Canyon in Colorado. I also have vivid memories of my first impression of the vast industrial wastelands east of the Mississippi as the train would roll past abandoned steel mills and dilapidated train stations — each of which stood as a crumbling monument to a faltering industrialized nation.

All said, I suspect I’ve crossed the United States at least a dozen times by train, sometimes across the northern prairies on The Empire Builder; once through Texas and across the southern lowlands from New Orleans to Florida. Last I knew, those tracks had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and never repaired. A vast section of our heritage is essentially erased from the map.

All that said, despite so many vivid memories of long afternoons in the lounge car watching the world go by, when compared to railway systems in the rest of the world, American trains suck! (Sorry Amtrak. It’s not your fault! Americans just can’t seem to get their heads together when it comes to the virtues of a viable infrastructure for moving humans outside the luxurious environment of the gluttonous automobile.)

A year living in France provided countless opportunities to jump on the sleek TGV train that takes you from Paris to the Mediterranean in just over three hours. That same trip is a solid eight-hour drive, even with the superior French autoroute system where the default cruising speed is 80 mph. (130 kph) I love the German, Austrian, and Swiss trains too, especially the Railjet that takes you from Munich through Vienna to Budapest in a matter of hours. Most recently, we had to find our way from London to Edinburgh after taking in a Friday night show on the West End. The newly refurbished Caledonian Express provided a reasonably priced sleeper with the added bonus of a single-malt whiskey tasting in the lounge car to make sure we slept well before arriving in Scotland at dawn.

I’ve barely begun my research on the topic of great trains outside of Europe. A single round-trip between Tokyo and Kyoto on the world-famous Shinkansen bullet train most certainly lived up to the hype, while the lumbering vintage era rail cars that carry locals from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, then on to Malaysia, felt like a throw-back to an episode of I Love Lucy, replete with a coach bedecked with bunkbeds and heavy curtains to assure some modicum of privacy during the overnight journey. I was just days away from traveling to China with the anticipation of riding the Maglev train into Shanghai, reportedly the fastest train in the world! If I remember correctly, a magnetic levitation system causes the train to hover above the rails, essentially flying just inches above the ground. That trip in the winter of 2020 never materialized as rumors were just emerging that some crazy virus had evolved out of an open-air market in Wuhan and travel to China was suddenly forbidden.

Maybe someday.

I will always be incredibly grateful for two very different railway journeys on the African continent. The first one was in 2013 when we took the Shosholoza Meyl train from Johannesburg to Cape Town. That overnight voyage is most memorable for the moment the man from the compartment next door ducked his head in to let us know that Nelson Mandela had died. I’ve been dying to write that entire story for nearly ten years now. I will eventually get around to it one day.

Quite by contrast, we celebrated a landmark anniversary a few years back on the Rovos Rail Luxury Train that travels from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe to Pretoria, South Africa. I will grapple for the rest of my days over the dichotomy of a finely dressed European throwing treats off the rear platform of the observation car to the local children who chased the pokey rail-cruise-liner through a desolate African town while armed guards stood along the rails to make sure none of the adolescent boys jumped onto the train.

Yet another journey with so much to unpack.

This is to say nothing of various day trips, like the seething and smelly journey along the southern coast of Sri Lanka, the quirky little trains that run down the spine of mountainous Corsica, or the relatively short ride across the frozen tundra between Stockholm and Orebro, Sweden in the dead of winter when the days shrink to just a few hours of sunlight between dawn and dusk.

One of my very first stories here on MEDIUM was called The Train Station Game, musing on the phenomenon of becoming invisible in the corner of a railway concourse while watching the world flow past as if you simply didn’t exist. And so it is with train travel, except by inversion. Trains ply through cities, mountains, and sprawling countryside as we look out the window to catch a glimpse into other people’s lives.

And now, as I bring this essay to a close, we’ve just crossed into Belgium.

The fields are greener. The church steeples in the villages are distinct and huge wind turbines dot the horizon as a reminder that my energy-efficient train likely draws its power from a renewable energy source.

When there is so much to worry about back home, whether that be politics on the eve of an election or the frustrations du jour in the workplace, there is so much to be thankful for, simply whizzing by out the window near my seat. It’s easy to miss a lot at 36,000 feet, but impossible to ignore any of that at eye level.

It is, indeed, a privilege to see and experience the world this way — for which I’m thankful every month of every year.

I thank You God for most this amazing day For the leaping greenly spirits of trees And a blue true dream of sky And for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes

e.e. cummings

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