Disclaimer: Some of the views in this text may be owed to the very specific conditions under which I wrote them: On the middle seat – in the middle aisle – fringed by leg and lung strong babies – on a transatlantic 7-hour work flight.
British Airways™ beaches without a soul, Intrepid™ lets-all-grin-naturally-into-the-camera group hikes up Machu Picchu – the week before my late summer holiday I couldn’t help but notice that the billboards on my way to work were plastered with travel ads. Reasons not to throw myself in front of oncoming trains when thinking of the working day ahead, I guess.
While I registered the ads, those images couldn’t be further from my dream holidays. What started with an innocent Eurostar journey across the channel a few years back has morphed into full-on rail obsession. Symptoms include spending indefensible sums of money on this at best moderately comfortable mode of travel and a growing incomprehension as to why anyone would want to do anything but sit on trains during their hard-earned time off.
And so it happens that last week I travelled to the most beautiful corner of the country (aka Scotland) and back and the only thing I want to talk about is how I got there (Queue the weird immersive bit) …
0 hours into our journey
We arrive at a hidden corner of Euston station at 8.50pm with 10 minutes to spare until boarding the Caledonian sleeper train to Fort William. Without any security checks to pass, we have time to identify candidates among our fellow passengers who could be characters in the Agatha Christie version of our journey.
The white-haired woman with peering eyes certainly has detective potential. Her bright yellow raincoat seems designed to lull us into a false sense of ‘oh-how-cuteness’ as she prepares to mercilessly dissect our darkest secrets. Another couple like us – i.e. one where it is obvious that he agreed to squeeze his 2-metre frame into a Caledonian Sleeper bunk bed because she thought it’d be ‘fun’ to go to Scotland by train #truelove #sorrynotsorry #ThanksA. They appear innocent at first glance but there is potentially murderous resentment bubbling beneath the surface. Then there is the US pensioner travel group. Judging by their guide’s shrieking instructions, it sounds as if there will be at least one person on our train who wouldn’t mind sending one or two travellers overboard between Glasgow and Fort William. A gilet-ed couple and their dachshund strut past us to the first-class waiting lounge. How does the dog not pee on this 12-hour overnight journey?! Seriously, how does that work? And could a mad scramble to get rid of canine excrements be the beginnings of a crime?!
15 minutes in
We enter our twin cabin. The carpet is chequered. The walls are chequered. The placemat on the foldable desk is chequered. Someone clearly went all out to show just how much pattern you can cram into a confined space. In case we wake up in the middle of the night and forget where we’re going. A tartan coffin. But for now, we’re infatuated with it all. So, we just look at each other and say: ‘Such an adventure’, unironically.
30 minutes in
I hoist myself up the train bunk bed while you press yourself against the wall to make room for my swinging extremities. Another intimacy milestone hit. You don’t remember that we would be sharing a toilet with the other passengers, but you agree to put this down to your bad memory. This trip will be fun.
2 hours in
In the train dining card, our cheese and onion toasties taste exactly like you would imagine something taste that was produced at a swinging 300km/h. Speed and wobbly trays and metal wheels grinding over steel tracks. Behind you I spot two Glaswegians. You couldn’t get more cliched characters if you asked a cartoonist to draw a gangster. One of them has tear tattoos on his cheeks. I say I’m sure he’s very sweet. You remember reading that those tattoos are gang symbols for having killed someone. We stop the Agatha Christie game.
6 hours in
I try to climb quietly off the bunk bed for the third time. I really shouldn’t have had peppermint tea in the dining cart. A reflex to calm myself down after the tear-tattoos revelation. I can feel your gaze. ‘Sorry for waking you up. Again’. You can hardly hear the apology over the rattling of the door in its hinge. It has been obstinately counter-acting the train’s sleep-inducing choo-choo-choo with a set of erratic clonks …. Clonk clonk …. Clonk clonk clonk …………. CLONK ever since we picked up speed outside of London. I move our bags out of the way. We strategically piled them up against the door in a desperate attempt to silence the rattling when we were not yet too tired to be proactive about the noise.
6 hours and 5 minutes in
The fluorescent toilet light doesn’t lose its eyeball-punching quality however many times I go. It is reflected in a myriad of sprinkles on the toilet seat. Forceful flushing or signs of my predecessors unsteady relief? At this stage I don’t care to guess.
8 hours in
‘Have you managed to sleep at all’.
‘I don’t think so’.
10 hours in
The sun rises. It warms the air and does something to the hinges to stop their incessant rattle. A sweet, sweet quiet descends. We open our cabin door to look out both sides of the train. Scotland blue skies stretch over endless lochs and undulating hills. It feels special looking at the landscape from the train. Or perhaps that’s just my stiff neck forcing me to keep my head locked in at an awkward angle. That and sleep deprivation. We try taking pictures, but the scenery moves too fast for our cameras, so we just have to sit and watch. The train imposing what three meditation apps couldn’t teach me.
Sitting on a moving engine that is running fast enough to make the landscape outside go blurry yet slowly enough for me to feel the literal bumps of the world passing by – somewhere between this physicality and sight, that’s where train travels’ magic must lie. And the fact that you can stand up and lie down and walk around and don’t have to queue for long-winded check-ins. That too.
12 hours in
At 10am we stagger off the train at Fort William. The shakiness of the journey still echoing in my knees, I glimpse the next holiday adventure right in front of me: Clouds of steam billow around its massive shape, a rumbling sounds deeply from its core. And while we are booked in for the next day, I’m immediately envious of anyone else who gets to scale this gleaming colossus. The Jacobite Steam Train.
As I stand there in the morning light, filled with anticipation and delight, I decide it doesn’t really matter why or where my new-found rail passion came from as long as I can be filled with this sense of excitement that no travel ads can evoke and no rattling can destroy. So while it lasts, give me blurry high-speed landscapes and the thrill of hovering dangerously over sprinkled train toilet seats over perfect filter focus and paddle-boarding on the Atlantic any day.
Because I love reading even more than I love trains, here are a few of my recent travel lit discoveries:
If you want to think about travel as a matter of perspective check out Voyage around my room by Xavier de Maistre. Or for a more contemporary and slightly less extreme take, I’m reading Local by Alastair Humphreys at the moment.
If you want to feel a renewed sense of curiosity for art museums I recommend All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley.
And if you want to deal with the desperate feeling of not having enough time to see everything Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman completely changed my perspective on that.
(Note to self: Read more travel literature by women!!!)