To All The Trains I’ve Loved Before

Oh, I have a long love affair with train travel.

It started as a teen in the late 80s/young adult in the early 90s  when I would take the GO train into Toronto from Oshawa with my friends.

We’d watch the big lake go by, pass the Toronto specific row houses, colourful and tall and skinny, enter Union station, heart of the downtown skyscraper core, then marvel at the ease of subway hopping!

We didn’t have trains in our suburban city. This felt so freeing!

We’d hang at the Eaton Centre or go to the ROM (where one time we surreptitiously kissed the statue of Dionysus) or browse shops on Queen Street. Each stop just a token away.

Ah, the freedom!

I still remember an environmental tee shirt I almost bought in one of those eclectic Queen Street shops.

It had a cartoon drawing of an elephant and in lettering that may or may not have been comic sans—

—wait, was comic sans even a thing in the late 80s/early 90s? [insert internet search here. Results: no? Comic sans was ‘invented’ in 1994…]

Anyway, in lettering reminiscent of comic sans it said: The Environment. It’s f*cked.

This felt so very edgy to me! And this discovery of edginess, in a pre internet era, was a sheer delight that I can still feel in my body to this day, decades later.

The combination of cute cartoon + despair + truth bomb/expletive was unlike anything I’d find in our boring suburban Oshawa mall.

Thanks for bringing me to this delightful discovery, train!

I remember I almost bought that tee

shirt. I still recall outlining a pro/cons list with my friend right there in the shop. [Insert the proverbial Shopping With Friends Inquiry, the long ‘should I get it?’ soliloquy.]

Ultimately the f-bomb tipped me into the ‘no’ category. I didn’t want to have to field off the environmental existentialism the heavy f-bomb was sure to invoke in passerbys.

A tee shirt like that is/was a statement piece and meant to be provocative. Especially so in 1980/90s suburbia.

I decided I didn’t want that kind of attention and also, I realised, I didn’t fully believe what it was saying.  

So, if asked, I wouldn’t be able to argue eloquently on the tee shirt’s behalf. Ergo: no.

Ah, the path not travelled.

The GO train brought me to this memory.

So many other memories too!

Backpacking around Europe in the 90s and travelling there again in the 2010s reminded me how COOL and EASY train travel can be.

In the 90s I had a Euro Rail pass, which I used to go EVERYWHERE, a concept dazzling to someone who only had the GO and Toronto subway line as reference points.

It was a REVELATION to realise one could travel easily this way.

It’s like you get to sit in a moving living room and, if you want, watch an amazing series of scenes roll by.

You can also talk or snooze or daydream or work or read a book or whatever.

You can meet fellow backpackers, or just watch all the small towns and backyards, with their glimpses into pockets of life, and wonder philosophically about human lives…who is embarking/disembarking…all the people…

You can also stand up, go to the bathroom, go to the ‘club car’, eat, drink. All while moving along with a community from and between and to a destination.

I remember a very long train trip from Valencia, Spain to Rome, Italy that took us right through the French Riviera. I hadn’t planned on visiting the riviera but suddenly out the window, there it was. Wow.

Experiencing train travel in Europe and then coming back to barely-any-trains Canada is a real lesson in yearning over what could have been, what should be.

WHY DON’T WE HAVE MORE/BETTER TRAINS is a question I have asked more than once.

And the ‘sorry we can’t afford it’ blah blah is not adequate as a response to me.

Investment decisions that pretend car travel is somehow ‘better’ infrastructure very quickly unravel once car-centrism is unmasked.

Do not tell me a vast and efficient train network is impossible here.

I also took the train from Cairo to Luxor in Egypt as well as a train from Bangkok, Thailand to Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia. As well as subway systems in Hong Kong, London, Singapore, Madrid, Rome, Paris…

I took the romantically named SKY TRAIN when I lived in Vancouver.

The view of the mountains, the city scape, the everyday people moving here and there, was magnificent.

You could say I’m forgetting the ‘freedom’ of cars. I had my drivers licence at sixteen and also drove into Toronto with my friends by borrowing the family station wagon.

But driving requires concentration and also one is cocooned away from everything: it’s not the same.

It’s isolating, you’re trapped in there, stuck in your seat with whoever else is trapped in there with you, sealed off from the rest of humanity, and, once you’re locked into a freeway, or rolling through suburban cul de sacs, it’s all incredibly boring.

And then, once anywhere, you have to figure out parking! An absolute anxiety!

It’s just so much nicer to take the train!

If the math doesn’t move you (more people can be moved by train than by car) and the logic doesn’t either (trains can be efficient, fast, electric) then perhaps consider the comfort and romanticism, the networked humanity of it all.

So much can roll right by your window, enter your seating area, join you at your destination, prompting experiences that later become memories.

Hop on a train, be among the people. See something you might not have seen before (and might never see again). Be curious.

For when will the same configuration and confluence of sights, sounds, people and scenes (and, yes, even tee shirts) ever reappear?

They won’t.

On a train, this is the flow of life, a slice of it, to be experienced and met right now.

Ephemeral but integral.

Real connections to life.

Why don’t we prioritize, in all facets of our community planning, more points of connection, more places of fluctuating engagement, humans showing up with other humans? The art and flow of real life?

Trains, I love you.

I WISH WE HAD MORE TRAINS!

Weekly News Digest - “The Blowhole”

Slate - “We Are All Roadkill Now” (The toll of our automobile infatuation.)

Globe and Mail - Climate change will knock one-third off world economy, study shows (Previous estimates considerably underestimated the costs. The impact could be similar to what fighting a full-blown war would be, every year for the foreseeable future.)

Bloomberg - The Sponge City (Give SpongeBob SquarePants the key to the city!)

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