I travel by train whenever I can. Here’s why it makes me happy, and why you should try it too.
I do it for the journey
I love travelling. Not reaching a destination, but being on the journey. I’m fascinated by that in-between state – that state of being «away» but «not there yet». Mind you, this feeling isn’t exclusively reserved to train travel.
I love flying.
I just love travelling by train a little bit more.
When I flew the family nest over 15 years ago, I suddenly had to cook for myself. But it wasn’t long until this necessity became a virtue. Today, rattling those pots and pans is a fundamental part of my life. I’m a true foodie and devour everything from junk food to star-awarded cuisine. Literally. I eat way too fast.
Opinion
This is a subjective opinion of the editorial team. It doesn't necessarily reflect the position of the company.
When I first swapped short-haul flights for long train journeys, it was for environmental reasons. Now, I actually take pleasure in them. So if I’m travelling within Europe, I’ll take the train whenever I can. It’s been a long time since I did it purely for moral reasons or to lessen my carbon footprint. I just love going on long, slow journeys. Train journeys in particular are an absolute joy for me. I prefer travelling during the day, as taking the night train would mean missing the journey, i.e. the very journey I want to experience.
The prospect of boarding a train in Zurich and taking up a seat for the next eight hours fills me with delight. Other people share the journey with me for short stretches. Passengers get on and off the train, fill the air with the clatter of their laptop keyboards and play cards at the four-seater tables. The sun rises, then sets. Mountains, rivers, forests, villages and towns race by. Time stands still, but somehow manages to fly. The old punk sitting in front of me in his short-sleeved, checked shirt, two-finger typing his way through spreadsheets for his NGO job, suddenly disappears. In his place, there’s an elderly lady who takes great pains to ask the dining car staff for the smallest bottle of water available. Five decilitres. Four euros.
It’s also why I adore flying – that mystical experience that’ll never lose its appeal. The notion of deliberately taking off, then temporarily hanging between the earth and the universe fills me with awe. All the stressful airport stuff that comes beforehand makes the flight feel like a reward. Like I’m a dog getting a treat after performing a trick. Check-in, security, passport control and the stateless zone at the gate, where you can stuff your face with fast food and beer at 8 a.m. without getting any funny looks. The stressed-out tourists carrying neck pillows and sleep masks. The suited-and-booted business travellers who’ve seen it all before. The chaos that ensues during boarding when everyone fights for space in the hand luggage compartments. The safety briefing. And then the relief when, thanks to Bernoulli’s Law, the plane lifts off the ground and you feel a slight tingling sensation in the pit of your stomach.
The thing is, it actually feels like a journey, and not like you’re cattle being herded from one place to another. The culinary offerings available around the world’s train stations are in a different universe. Train Bleu in the Gare de Lyon or Brasserie Süd in Zurich are light years away from the fast food joints you get in international airports. And on the occasions when you can’t find a suitable restaurant in the station, there’s almost always one in the immediate vicinity. When you’re flying, it’s a different story. Once you go through security, you’re met with a culinary desert consisting of triangle sandwiches, US fast food and the most expensive «local» specialties, which also happen to be the most inedible «local» specialties.
The experience of getting on a train is also more relaxed. There’s no boarding group number, no gate confusion. All you’ve got to do before your train arrives is figure out which platform it’s leaving from and where your reserved carriage is going to be. The complexity of this process depends on which country you’re in. In Japan or China, the area where you have to queue to get to your reserved seat is marked right there on the platform. In Italy and France, things are slightly trickier. It’s not uncommon for the platform to be announced just a moment before the train arrives. Those in the know can sit back and relax in the coffee bar until the time comes.
Train delays tend to be more of an inconvenience than a problem. If you’re travelling by rail, you usually plan enough time for emergencies, arriving a day earlier for your business trip and departing a day later. You plan two hours for your connection from Paris to London since it involves changing stations. However, if something does go awry and you get stuck somewhere, you can at least use the time to explore the surrounding area. That’s what I recently ended up doing in Mannheim. Had I been at an airport, I would’ve been stranded in that zone of statelessness. In Mannheim, I was at least in Mannheim. Granted, it wasn’t much better than statelessness, but at least I felt a bit freer.
I’m so obsessed with train travel that I’m happy to choose longer routes so that I get more time on the train. When the Limmattal light rail line opened, I travelled from terminus to terminus and then on to Baden. Just so that I could enjoy the new route. The journey took 40 minutes longer than any other connection between Zurich and Baden. Forty minutes of additional travel time that made me very happy. It’s great to discover routes I know like the back of my hand from a completely new perspective.
Train travel is also the antithesis of the prevailing bucket-list mentality. In recent years, people have started telling me which places they’ve «done» on their trips. Although they mean the places they’ve seen, using that language makes it all sound more like work to me. «We did Venice» translates to «we’ve crossed a Venice visit off our to-do list». You know what? It sounds just as ambiguous as the title of the porn film Debbie Does Dallas. Oh, you did Venice, did you? A travel quickie, so to speak. A speedy travel climax achieved via short-haul flight.
Personally, I prefer travelling without achieving anything. I enjoy the fact that I could use a train journey to finally finish reading my book, but end up not even opening it because I’m too busy looking out of the window. The Po Valley landscape with its poplars and electricity pylons flickers by, fields lost in the morning mist. And I’m satisfied that it’ll take a couple of hours to get to Venice. Where I’ll arrive relaxed, invigorated and enriched by the experience of another train journey.
