‘My love affair with rail’: the rewards of romantic travel

Walking briskly towards Salisbury station, I double checked the Trainline app on my phone for my departure time. I would make it. Just. I waved my phone with the digital ticket at the man on the barrier and jogged to the carriage.

A sense of relief swept over me. I could see an empty table farther down. I took one of the window seats, unpacked my computer, and exhaled as the doors closed and we drifted away. For the past 30 years, I have opted to travel by train rather than fly.

My love affair with rail began early. My granny used to take my brother and I on holidays by train every summer. We would walk to her local station in Fishbourne in West Sussex with our small suitcases, get picked up by one of the old local slam-door trains, and then range wherever we wanted across the country.

Whether we ended up in seaside hotels on the south coast in Bournemouth or Brighton, or went to visit our numerous great uncles and aunts in Lincolnshire via London, the magic always began long before we reached our destination.

I remember especially fondly the feeling as a young boy of pound coins sweating in my hands while I bravely made my way to the restaurant car. Returning with bags of goodies on my way back to our seats.

Back in the present, I looked up from my laptop and stared out the window as the countryside unfurled beside me. I felt a familiar comfort from the landscape, just looking at it through the window always calms me. It gives my eyes something to occupy themselves with while thoughts unspool in my mind.

I was on the train to write because I was after the way it feels to be on a train just as much as where it happened to be taking me. Trains have always been multipurpose for me, you see.

They are, of course, very practical too. Sweeping you gently and calmly from one place to another, no matter how complex the terrain. I have also always enjoyed the premium you get from travelling sustainably, and I’m not talking about feeling smug and virtuous – although these days there is that too.

No, what I’ve realised over the past three decades is that travelling slowly is good for entirely selfish reasons. It’s simply more rewarding and fun.

On long train journeys – up to Scotland or on sleepers carrying you all over Europe – you watch the world around you evolve and change in ways you could never imagine on a plane. The sounds change too – overheard conversations in different accents and languages stretch your sense of place the farther away from home you go. I swear the light changes as well.

It is as though travelling by train allows you to acclimatise to your surroundings in a way that frees you to live in your destination rather than just visit it.

Trains are also incredibly romantic in a way a cramped seat on a passenger plane could never be. I have so many memories of travelling in this way that when I stare out the window I often see a different landscape from the one in front of me. A landscape of my life so far. The window of a train releases many memories. Some of which only make sense years on.

Another popped up as we traversed Bradford-on-Avon. I was on my way home from Warsaw to London via Paris on a sleeper train. I now realise it was 20 years ago, unbelievably. This was the moment train travel revealed its ability to access the otherworldly portal of my mind I now use when writing.

I was in the top bunk and there was a man in the one opposite me. The others were empty. We made pleasantries in English. His broken, mine ashamed because I had no Polish. He was a soldier but on the run. He had a wild look of relief in his eyes, but I could see the dread that lay beneath it just under the surface of his facial expression.

I gave him one of the beers I had for the journey and he drank it like it was the last one he would ever taste. He was much older than me and running from something other than the army I remember thinking at the time. I turned and lay back on my bunk staring at the ceiling as the train juddered away. I knew the moment would be frozen in my mind forever as soon as it happened – although I didn’t know why at the time.

But here the memory is again. On the train from Salisbury to Bristol 20 years on. Making itself known on the page because today is the day I am ready to unravel what the memory wants to say.

I was running too back then, just like him, you see. I just didn’t realise it. I still am running I suppose. Perhaps we all are. Eventually we will have to turn and face what was hidden beneath the temporary relief one of my warm beers gave him that day.

As we got within half an hour of Bristol, I felt my mind re-engaging with normal life once more. The portal the train helped me access was closing. The words I was writing began to fade away. There was no use trying to grasp hold of them. The memories and what they were trying to tell me would come again.

My normal worries and concerns about life in general sat next to me once more, nudging me in the back as I put my laptop away.

I left the destination I had come for as the station I was travelling to entered my day.

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