On the scale of train travel fandom, I’d put myself at about an eight out of ten. I was never one of those kids who built train sets, although I liked watching them whenever we were stuck at a railroad crossing as a boy. My appreciation for traveling on trains came later in life, and is specific to long-distance leisure travel. (Subways are great but don't evoke a lot of passion within me.) 

I first fell in love with train travel in China, on some long train journeys across the center of the country, from Chengdu in Sichuan to the majestic karst columns of Wulingyuan in Hunan and then down to Guangzhou. Later, in India, I enjoyed some similarly long train rides from Pondicherry in the southeast across to Kochi and up to Mumbai. These trips were part of a multi-month backpacking trip across Asia and the Middle East, back in 2008 as a 24-year-old. There was something romantic and epic about long train trips. The sheer volume of hours, the pace at which beautiful scenery unfolded before you, the ruggedness and sweat of the bunks.


I couldn't find any pics from the train ride, but here's one of a much younger me in Wulingyuan

The scenery, depending on where you go, is at the heart of the experience. Unlike a road trip, trains allow you the privilege of glimpsing hundreds or thousands of individual places as you travel from A to B. Think of a travel brochure for a train trip, and you probably imagine a lonely train following a curving track around majestic mountains or sun-dappled, turquoise coastlines. But in my experience, I’ve always found something beautiful outside the window, even in less celebrated stretches of my journeys, such as the sparse desert scrub outside of Rajasthan, the densely cultivated rice fields of southern China, or a pretty stream in the rural Midwest. Beyond the natural beauty one encounters, there’s also something fabulous about seeing so much of what humans have built: great bridges, tunnels and skyscrapers, but also random junk in someone’s backyard, sneaky graffiti on the underside of some dilapidated building (no doubt on the track’s wrong side), semi-trailers waiting at the crossing.


In addition to looking out the window, you also get to do more. Riding trains is often more comfortable and physically liberated, at least compared to coach class on planes, buses or even cars. Also, walking through and between cars on a moving train is simply cool. You get to spread out and stretch, whether at your seat or in a common car. There’s a place just for eating. It’s a bit like a moving village (think 'Snowpiercer', but less murder), or at least, a kind of house, with separate rooms for sleeping, hanging out, eating, etc.


Taking the train in coach class feels like the "people’s journey", which happens to align with the working-class roots of my politics. There's something disarming and equalizing about being co-passengers in a train car: where else can you begin conversing with such a diverse range of people so easily? Sitting in the observation deck of a long-haul Amtrak train like the California Zephyr, I enjoy a wider cross-section of America than I encounter in my daily life. Indeed, with only coach seats and a few sleeper classes, Amtrak’s class tiers themselves feel like a nod to the myth of America as a 'middle-class society' (lower-, middle-, upper-...but always finishing with ‘middle class’).  This stands in contrast to a conversation I had at a backpacker hostel in India, where bourgeois bohemians on gap years competed to see who had roughed it the hardest:


“I knew it was gonna be a long 20 hours in Unreserved General class when I saw other passengers bringing their livestock on board.”


My own train rides in India were in the more comfortable but still affordable sleeper class. I had purchased a children’s book in New Delhi to practice writing the Hindi alphabet. Not long after I pulled out the book and began writing out the letters, a few local men gathered behind me, delighted at the sight of a foreigner attempting to learn their national language. Because they spoke English--it turns out several were on their way back to university--we were able to chat about cricket, Australia, gulab jamun, and other random topics. For me, that train carriage quickly transformed from an uncomfortable box, packed tight with strangers and foreign smells, into a freshman college dorm room, where the locals pepper the study abroad student with friendly questions.

 

Alas, no train pics from India, but here's one with Kiran Soni Gupta, then Divisional Commissioner of Jodhpur, and my host Arvind (both of whom I met on Couchsurfing)


About a year later, back in China, I moved from Chengdu to Beijing. I chose to do so by train, bunking in a ‘soft seat’. Inspired by my earlier long-distance train travel, making the passage by train felt more monumental and classic (like my life as a novel), versus the far more sanitized default choice of flying. I was two years into my time living in China, during which I'd strived to master the language and deepen my relationship with my ethnic motherland. I remember my excitement at finally being able to hold long, relatively wide-ranging conversations in Mandarin with some of my bunk neighbors. All of those hours in class and memorizing flashcards were beginning to pay off.


Long-distance train travel does more than bring diverse groups of people together for a fixed period: it creates a welcoming space for them to connect with each other. In our age of widening polarization, sitting in an observation car with a friendly disposition feels like a needed act of citizenship, a gesture toward political healing. As a new American, I like to imagine that while riding the train across this country, I can also contribute to mending our social fabric, even if in the tiniest of ways. For here we are, all together, at least for the next day or two, united in our desire to see the country and appreciate its beauty. We may not agree on some things, but at least we can agree on that. And who knows? Along the way--city slicker or country boy, conservative or liberal--our tribal identities might fade just long enough for us to remember that we have more in common than we've come to believe.