For most people today the train is just a means of getting to work. From our suburban station, we ride in increasingly crowded carriages until we get to the city stations, and shuffle off onto crowded platforms and up uncertain escalators and out of the station and off to wherever we work. We don't think about the trains all day until work is over and we hope it's running on time and we can repeat the procedure and get home as quick as we can. Aluminium, hopefully air-conditioned, rubbish on the floor, graffiti on the windows, rubbish and graffiti on the seats, they are a means to an end and nothing more.
And yet, if from inside a train late at night, you see the yellow light on an empty platform, perhaps a young couple waiting together, you are reminded of the romance the rails once held, and sometimes still do. Watch a busy city station when a steam engine happens to pull through. Voices drop, heads turn, and together we watch this archaic vehicle make its way noisily, belching black smoke, hissing steam, rattling on the rails, and all we see is an elegant survivor from a simpler, more innocent time, and there in the chaos of a modern city, the station becomes a sudden pool of yearning. Then the train goes and modernity floods us in its wake.
Trains were the harbingers of modern life. Now we could travel great distances in reasonable time and reasonable comfort. People who had never travelled more than ten miles from their home could travel across countries, across continents. And many did, a whole world opening to the common person. Crops, livestock, and minerals could now be transported quickly and efficiently from deep inside a landmass and taken to the ports for transportation across the seas. Modern globalisation began with the rails.
Now we needed to know the time in other places. If a train left New York, say, at midday, when would it encounter the train from Chicago, which left at Chicago's midday? Two metal behemoths driven by engines powered by high pressure steam heading towards each other with no idea of when or where they might meet and no way to avoid each other if they did was clearly a recipe for disaster. Time zones were introduced across the United States expressly to make sure everyone knew where trains were going to be at any time.
So the history of trains is not just adventure and romance. Making long distance travel relatively fast and convenient saw small towns, often self-contained communities, become mere specks on the way to somewhere else, as goods could now come in from the big cities and the young people would go away. The death of many a small country town was heralded by their train station.
They have been the tools of oppression and control. The transcontinental railway of the United States brought the country together and made it easier to drive the Native Americans off their lands. The trains of India, now a backbone of the country, were put in place by British companies to take their produce out of the country and get armed troops to trouble spots as quickly as possible. The train timetables of 1914 made war inevitable as armies were mobilised via rail even before war was declared, with no way to bring them back. And how can we forget the millions shovelled into trains and freighted to the death camps of Nazi Germany, through stations with flowerbeds and painted clocks that no 'passenger' would see twice? Or the long tracks across Russia to take their internal enemies to isolation and death in the gulags? Even now, China has built an "impossible" rail line into Tibet through the natural border of the Himalayas, an act described by the Dalai Lama as 'cultural genocide'.
Tom Zoellner in his book Train: Riding the rails that created the modern world - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief covers well the many facets of railway history, and the train's continuing economic and social impact. There is a good potted history of trains, (the Americans called it the 'railway', the British the 'railroad', then at some point they swapped) then the rest of the book is taken up of his travels on long-distance trains, including going down the length of Britain, crossing Russia and the United States, through India, China, South America and the super fast trains of Japan. Each chapter considered the purpose and history of these lines, and their future. Rail is still the most efficient and greenest way to transport heavy materials across country, even if governments are reluctant to spend money on the infrastructure. Perhaps one of the impacts of global warming will be a return to the trains on a greater scale. While the book isn't as enthralling as I had hoped, it is good. Perhaps to a more dedicated train man, there would be greater appeal.
As I've mentioned, I work on the trains in Melbourne Australia. Since the 90s, railway patronage has boomed from a long decline as people got tired of putting expensive petrol into cars to drive to difficult-to-find parking and paying through the nose. Government (not only Victoria's but everywhere; the long decline and sudden rise of passenger numbers was common throughout the first world) was slow to react, and tired facilities and other inefficiencies saw long delays and cancelled or overcrowded trains. Since I've been working, however, new trains continue to be bought and put into service, more services are running and are more on time, stations are being redeveloped, or new ones added, and level-crossings are disappearing, leading to a more efficient passenger service. Co-incidence? Perhaps… I'm not going to pretend everything's fine, but it is much better and continues to improve. People are voting with their feet and passenger numbers still rise.
I don't think we'll see another golden age of the railway. The luxury services are more expensive than flying, by quite a margin, and we all seem to have less time than ever. Attempts to put in fast trains between Sydney and Canberra, or other Australian cities, always come up against the barrier of cost versus benefit, perhaps rightly. Europasses and long rail trips are the stuff of holidays and backpacking, not of everyday life. But next time you're in the train, heading to work, wondering if they guy next to you even knows what deodorant is, try to listen to the rhythm of the wheels in their timeless pattern on steel, rock and wood, and ponder the long history that you are part of, every time you ride.
