Train

Before the railway you could go anywhere you wanted. Ours is a vast undiscovered country full of breath-taking landscapes. The railway can hardly get there. They could cut through the mountains over the rivers and streams, they could use viaducts, they could try and they have tried, but the railway can’t reach them. This country has scenery you couldn’t possibly imagine if you hadn’t lain eyes on it, if you’d kept to where the trains wanted you to go. People try their best. The engineers inspected, the labourers toiled, and before long a steady expanse of lines extended from north east west south to the far corners of our  country. The network is expansive but not all-encompassing. Imagine when you’re on that train passing by miles of untarnished forest, all the small towns and the villages, mould your mind to the reality that you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of the great wilderness of our country, you’re only seeing a teenth. And our country isn’t even the biggest. The railway is so convenient. When they started up building we couldn’t possibly imagine how convenient it would be, how easy it made it to get to all those wonderful undiscovered places of our country, you couldn’t predict the ease with which they hauled these places into existence as if out of nowhere, and now the lines are up, the locomotives are chunting and we just take it for granted. 

What is more impressive, the train or the place it can take you? I mean let’s not talk down the wonder of the train, painted over in gleaming red or a pearlescent blue, watch the train and its carriages passing by at high-speed, behold its majesty, don’t focus on the where it can take you to the detriment of the physical thing. Before the railway came we were hardly full, hardly complete, we were like the sketches for a house before it’s actually been built. It is almost inconceivable that we could have existed without it, how we could have known where to go and how even to get there. 

Because the thing about our country is that it’s unimaginably vast; such is its vastness it’s almost like it’s without end. Before the railways you would not have known where to go because the terrain was uncharted. Before the railways you could not have known whether to go forward or back whether to carry on on the path, on the interminable path, or whether to turn back and take stock at the last village you took shelter in. The railways are therefore a marker, a means of distinguishing, and if you take out a map of our country you cannot miss the carefully-etched red-coloured lines of our magnificent railway.  And you needn’t worry about where you are and where you could get to, the railway does it all for you.

I am writing this piece not out of some wild reverence for rail travel. I love trains and love to sit in them. I am writing this piece to point out how accustomed we became to the point of reliance, how we cannot conceive of a country without railways again, as if we wouldn’t accept it, as if we’d rant and go apoplectic if someone threatened to take our hallowed railways away,  if someone threatened to cut them right down. So used to the railways have we become that we forget what it was like to be on our own, traveling off our own back, if we wanted to go somewhere we had to walk, and if we wanted to know where we were going, we had to hazard a guess. We have become reliant on them and not just that, we refuse to go anywhere that that train doesn’t run to. 

But it doesn’t make much sense. I mean I can see all the landscape from behind the window yet can’t I realise, am I not able to foresee, that if the train were to stop, if I were to get out of the train right here, I could walk in this country, I’d be free in a place and the train couldn’t help me, and though it might pull off -- and yes this is a just the progression of a thought -- wouldn’t it then be as if the train never existed, as if I were self-sufficient, able to explore any tiny patch of this land I desired, since the train wouldn’t come and run me over, I wouldn’t be immediately frazzled once I strayed off the tracks, I mean isn’t it just an idea that I can’t go and explore wherever I want, like in the old days, the presence of the train isn’t a shackles and I can go wherever I please?  

Though it is so hard to remember what it was like before the train came along. Almost impossible. I can hardly remember, if at all, going anywhere, I don’t remember our country not being crisis-crossed by these train tracks and steam trains, I don’t remember the blank open spaces I don’t remember seeing the unimpaired sun.  It is said, or at least it is thought, that the train goes back all the way beyond the station at which it once started. That is to say the end of the line isn’t the end. All of our termini just appear to have buffers but people believe the tracks go right through and that maybe at night when the stations are empty the trains go in the opposing direction, they can even cross over our borders, and no one exactly knows where they go back to, but the landscape barely resembles our landscape, it shows signs of developing into what we have, it is the imprint on which our rail-side vistas are based and if this is true, so be it, but no one can actually get on the train going back, the doors are all bolted, the best you can do is lie in wait at the station and catch a glimpse of the train breaching the buffers.  

Yes I sometimes wonder. I have this inkling that I’ve been there before. Every place the train takes me is familiar, is seen, and though I can’t quite make sense of it, I feel this is some trick, I feel that if I could go back to the old way, to the Ur-state, I would see things I’d never seen before, I believe things would open up completely. So, I thank the train for taking me this far but it is time to get off it to see what this land has to offer.