A Thing About Trains

Each time I go to Boston I have two options: take the subway or the train, each trip amounting to twenty minutes. My choice is usually the train. When I stand on the platform waiting for it to arrive, I think back to the railway station in my hometown in Poland from which I departed many times. The Melrose Highlands station is different: it’s smaller, with only two platforms, one for the passengers heading for Boston, the other for the ones arriving from the city. There’s no building, where you could purchase the ticket. And yet it shares something with the one from my past. It evokes the mood of joyful and expectant waiting when I stare in the direction from which the train will emerge between two rows of trees.

If it were practical, I’d always choose to travel this way. Unfortunately, trains don’t go everywhere. Sometimes they take a circuitous route; the tickets are often more costly than airline tickets, and always many times costlier than the bus. But when I’m in Europe, which is crisscrossed with train lines, I travel by rail.

My fascination with trains began in childhood. I grew up in an apartment building that was about a ten-minute walk from the railway station and stood close to the railroad tracks. Passenger and freight trains passed by at all times of day and night, their soot-covered engines ejecting black smoke when they chuffed away from the station. The clangor of a heavy locomotive and the rumble of the passing wagons were the soundtrack of our lives, but we were used to it and rarely took notice.

No fence separated the backyard of our apartment building from the tracks. The rails ran on a stone embankment about a yard and a half tall. The embankment, the back wall of our building, and the low wall of a repair shop created a hollow where the neighborhood children played. The trains were a wonderful diversion, so each time we heard one approaching, we’d stop whatever game we were engaged in to watch it pass. When the engineer or his fireman looked out, we vigorously waved, and they usually waved back, their soot covered faces breaking into a grin. Sometimes one of them disappeared inside and sounded a horn, augmenting our glee. A freight train offered a different diversion. We counted the wagons, rarely came up with the same number and argued over the results.

No one back at the time was concerned about air pollution or ecology—such words didn’t exist in people’s vocabulary. None of our parents worried about the billowing smoke, though we were constantly warned not to go to the dangerous zone where the tracks were. No exhortation had any effect on our behavior. Climbing the embankment and walking the crossties proved our mettle. Some years later a concrete fence was erected along the entire stretch of tracks, so a friend and I scaled it to get a better view of the trains.

The first train ride I remember took place when I was about five. I went with my aunt to see an adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio at a puppet theater in Olsztyn, about twenty-five miles from my hometown. It was a local train connecting only three towns. I recall it well because the play made a big impression on me. Some years after that memorable trip, I was allowed to travel alone. I went on a train to visit family members who lived some distance from our town.

When I was a senior in high school, I realized that I had outgrown my surroundings and wanted to escape the small town I lived in. Real life was elsewhere, and if only I got admitted to a university, the train would take me there. I did pass the entrance exams, and from then on, several times a year I traveled from my university city to my hometown and back. The ride took ten hours to cover the three hundred miles as the train stopped at every small station. I kept telling myself it was perfect time for reading. And it was as long as I found a free seat and didn’t have to stand in the corridor. Polish trains at the time weren’t only slow—around holidays they were crowded. The second-class compartments had uncomfortable wooden benches while the first-class seats were upholstered. A lot of socializing went on in the compartments. Cooped up in a small space, passengers talked freely, revealing even the most personal details about their lives. After all, it was close to impossible that they’d encounter the same people again. Some food sharing went on too. Even now, the smell of hard-boiled eggs and canned fish reminds me of trains.

My husband doesn’t share my attachment to trains. As a child he traveled by train only once, when his kindergarten class was taken from his hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, to nearby Yazoo City to let the children experience riding a passenger train. By then the trains were dying out in various parts of the country, including the Deep South. The one his class boarded was none other than the City of New Orleans, immortalized by the Steve Goodman song. The children rode it fifty miles to Greenwood, where the bus was waiting to take them back home.

Today’s Polish trains are nothing like their humble predecessors. They are clean, comfortable, and they have well-stocked restaurant cars. I usually choose the high-speed Italian-produced Pendolino, which can run 130 miles per hour. Open-space cars have replaced the compartments. But there’s none of the camaraderie that was once such a big part of train travel. Passengers stare at their computer screens, listen to music or podcasts on their headphones, or talk on the phone. Most aren’t interested in talking to a fellow traveler. Even though I used to enjoy talking to strangers on the train, I no longer expect or even want an exchange. The world often feels too much with me and then a long train trip offers an escape from busyness and noise. I then have uninterrupted time to think, read, write, or look out the window. For that reason, I always take the silent car.