train – Page 3 – The Implausi.blog

Takes on a Train 6 – Deprivation

Here’s the trick, finally coming home on night 1: your willingness to take a long distance train journey is impacted heavily by your ability to fall asleep on the moving train.

For me, someone of my height, this isn’t great. There’s a couple factors in the way: fitting in the space of any of the seats as they’re currently configured; the ability to sleep with the cabin lights set to “on”; constant braking, decelerating to wait at a stop, then taking off again; other people in the cabin returning from a 1am smokebreak smelling like they ate the whole thing.

All of which are deal-breakers for me.

The thing is, I don’t know if the more high class lux fares would solve this problem either. Certainly it can help with a few, but the berths and sleepers are a) still too short, leaving me folded up in some way, and b) still subject to physics in the same way as everything else on the train.

Alas. Only 4 more nights to go. this one’s barely started.

Bonus: I do like having the dining car to myself at this hour though. Nice stuff. Peaceful. Able to get the first five posts typed up. There might be some unseen bonuses to this type of travel yet.

Takes on a Train 5 – Snowpiercer

Looking back out the dome to the rear of the train

Just capturing something notable from the Caporel stop mentioned last time. They opened the whole train for this one, because the siding at the station was long enough. So the people from the more Lux cars stepped out too. Not enough to mingle, but enough to see that they were there.

Kind of a reverse Snowpiercer (2013) thing happening: the nicer cars are further from the engine, due to Noise and the like, and fewer disturbances with people walking through.

Given the cost for those lux fares, this is effectively separation by class as well.

In 2025, it might be impossible to make a post about train travel without referencing Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho’s creative filmic adaptation of the french graphic novel Le Transperceneige, in much the same way that earlier posts would have talked about Murder on the Orient Express or some other cultural referent. (Did we ever get “Speed but on a train” as the high concept for a film in the mid 90s? I know that series stopped with the boat).

Point being, there might be something endemic about trains, especially the passenger variety, and how they’ve been serving customers for travel for the past two-hundred and twenty some-odd years.

(Is that all? It seems like such a dominant form of travel for the modern era, since eclipsed by passenger flight in the second half of the twentieth century. The speed at which the railways grew must have been mind boggling to those who witnessed it.)

Those early passenger trains, built in Britain and serving the particular nature of that class system of the Victorian era, echoes through time to how they’re experienced now (still), and how we feel ourselves experiencing the rails, mediated through the images and movies we’ve seen before we even step foot on the stairs into the car.

The built environment is not just the buildings around us, but the ways we move as well.

Takes on a Train 4 – Microcosm

The political economy of economy? Hmm. Perhaps not yet.

The train is a microcosm though, as we’ve had a chance too happen across more of the passengers the longer we’ve been on board. The evening stop at Caporel was where we had more of a chance. A guitarist was playing in the dome car, and some of the passengers were participating, singing along with some of the old standards.

There’s a real broad mix on the train, from the Hutterite family (three generations, perhaps), to the indigenous couple on their way back from the Jays game. There’s the young guy playing Raw v Smackdown on his laptop, who’s taken the trip 10 times, to the Turkish girl, to the two friends travelling together. The older lady who got off the train at Parry Sound (quick stop there), to the people who just don’t like flying. There’s the French-speaking backpackers, and some German speakers too. There’s a lot of language being thrown around.

Not a bad way to get around.

But it is a look at the country in miniature, with a broad sample of the population. “Sample size” would be the title, I guess, but Microcosm came to me first.

Takes on a Train 3 – Habit Space

I figure if I do this often enough it’ll become a habit.

(Both the writing, and the hobbies. And maybe the trains? TBD… )

Been working with a travel palette of watercolours that I brought. That, and a few other small things. We’ll see which one I enjoy most, but right now the watercolors are delightful. Being able to add a small degree of colour to a notebook beings it to life.

I think there was a guy who did oil paintings in an Altoid’s tin? The watercolors remind me a lot of that.

Oh here it is:

I’ll give the oil paints a test run first. I’m not sure how well they travel. But watercolour is inoffensive enough in a public space like a train.

Though perhaps semi-public is the way to describe it? Everyone is close, but off in their own space.

Not in the very close and not-at-all-private way that we’re used to in an airplane, or in the even closer contact you get in commuter transit.

So you get a modicum of space, of distance, and that plus the time gained from the pace of the thing, continuously moving, relentlessly forward, allows for the time needed to take up a hobby, or discover a new vocation en route.

It reminds me of the work by Matt Crawford, in Shopcraft as Soulcraft, (which of course echoes Pirsig’s ZATAOMM from decades earlier, where the space for the work impacts the work itself.

I talked about it a lot in my dissertation.

I haven’t looked at it in a few years.

We’ll return to it soon.

Takes on a Train 2 – Lux

Everybody is sleeping.

At 3 in the afternoon, everyone is in full-blown siesta mode.

Myself included.
(I’m a light napper).

It’s the pace that’s different, is what I’m getting at. It’s not that there’s that much else to do, either. Play a game, watch a saved vid, or whatever you downloaded the last time the data was above 1 bar, rolling through Bala or Torrance or Wasego or wherever.

But everyone is zonked right out. And moreover, has the room to get zonked.

Which to those accustomed to air travel is a luxury all on it’s own. Economy on the rails is some Air Emirates level of lux in the air, when it comes to space and mobility.

Granted, hours turn into days in terms of distance travelled, in some kind of reverse-Innisian metaphor. It’ll take 4+ days to cross what a plane could accomplish in 4+ hours.

But it kinda does feel lux.

I mean, there’s a certain luxuriousness in being able to even take the time for a five day trip in this day and age, where time is money. “You took your time? How decadent.” And again this is all in economy class, back with the hoi polloi. I’ve only heard rumors of the Prestige and Sleeper classes.

We’ll go exploring soon.