Addressing the Sexual Tension between Myself and Trains…
I have always found Paddington station to be very beautiful. For some reason it reminds me of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, something to do with the vaulted ceiling and all the glass. Both have very shiny floors also. Designed by Isambard Brunel and Matthew Digby Wyatt during the Victorian era, the station was opened in 1854 and is now a Grade I listed building on account of its roof being of considerable architectural interest. The big glass dome is supported by cast-iron pillars and three wrought iron arches, linked by two sets of transepts which create its cathedral-like structure and grandiose (in my mind Hall of Mirrors-like) feel. The sides of the arches are patterned, decorated with cast iron scrolls that are presumably a hangover from the architectural stylings of the Georgian era where everything was flowery and ornate. My favourite thing about the place is how the ribbing that runs along and across the dome-shaped ceiling looks like a giant skeleton - I like to imagine I’m stuck inside the belly of a giant whale. I am Jonah from the Bible, miraculously saved having been swallowed by a "great fish". I am Tom Waits singing ‘Starving in The Belly Of A Whale’. I am plankton.
The word “plankton” comes from the Greek “planktos” meaning “drifter” or “wanderer.” An organism is considered plankton if it is carried by tides and currents, unable to move against their force. Some plankton spend their entire lives this way, just drifting. The sensation of drifting is precisely the feeling that trains, or rather train rides, evoke in me. More often than not when I take the train it is a Great Western Railway service from London Paddington (I am aware that this in fact says a great deal about the type of person I am). More often than not I get to Paddington early because 1. I love it there 2. I have a dark, deep-seated psychological fear of missing the train, or any kind of transportation for that matter (I am aware that it is illogical since these days trains depart frequently one after the other and train tickets are flexible. I know that if I were to miss the train it would be no big deal, but still). More often than not from Paddington I am headed to Oxford for reasons of university. In this case, more often than not I make sure to catch a fast train. Its PB time is 45 minutes, but it usually averages around 52.
On this train ride, given it is not a very long one, to do anything other than simply drift would be unthinkable. I used to make the mistake of scheduling the duration of the train journey as a time to get things done, like finish an essay or something. But like I said, this was a mistake - as soon as I board a train I suddenly find myself incapable of doing anything other than drift. I don’t think this is just a me thing though (as much as I like to romanticise the fact that I have thoughts as if nobody else does). A.A. Milne once said “Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train.” I like to imagine “drifting” as a particular kind of thinking that is hyper-specific to trains. It is certain state of idle contemplation, one that is reflective, passive, quasi-meditative. Trains seem to be one of the few occasions where one is freed from the shackles of productivity (that all of us living in this achievement-driven capitalist society are necessarily tied up in). After all, although you might appear to be static while sitting on a train, the vehicle containing you is still moving, and therefore, technically, so are you. A train journey is a chance to do nothing while still doing something. The train is doing all the work and it’s as if it wants you to sit back and enjoy the ride. Don’t worry! It’s OK! You’re still moving, still going, still on the go go go, doing something, getting somewhere, achieving, WINNING!!!!
Ultimately, I think the sensation evoked by train rides, that of drifting, has something to do with the train being a symbolic space in the context of liminality. Anthropologist Victor Turner refers to liminality as an “essentially ambiguous and unsettling” transitional phase during which individuals are positioned at “a no-place and no-time that resists classification”. On a train, the temporal state of being in between “two dominant spaces”, that arises as one travels from one place to another, characterises it as a liminal space - a transitional, transformative environment that can evoke a variety of mental states or feelings such as eeriness, rumination or nostalgia i.e. the sensation that I like to think of as “drifting”.
Drifting is to sit and think, to stare out the window, to press your face up against the glass dramatically like a character from a movie. (Although people always make this association I am now trying and failing to recall a single movie I have watched in which a character has ever done this.) Listening to music is just about the only permissible activity. Preferably something contemplative, melancholic, raw, emotional, slow, sad, angsty, ambient, even, if you’re that way inclined. Beethoven, Lana Del Rey, Leonard Cohen, the soundtrack to Taxi Driver, the soundtrack to Interstellar, Hans Zimmer music generally, Jesscia Pratt, Tom Waits (always), Thom Yorke, Elliot Smith, Adrianne Lenker, Big Thief, Radiohead if they didn’t suck – you get the gist. Country and blues music are good options also. Especially since there are a ton of songs about trains and railroads in the blues and country music tradition. Blues in particular. A subsection of “railroad blues” developed alongside the mass migration of African Americans by train as they travelled from rural areas in the south to urban cities in the north following the abolition of slavery. Since the blues directly reflects the lives and struggles of the African American people, songs recorded this movement, recounting the story of migration with the train figuring at the centre of it all. The train became a metaphor for escape; initially the very real means by which to escape the harsh realities of life in the south, it was later transformed into a universal symbol of hope and freedom. In blues songs the train is a way out of the poor working conditions of the south, but also just a bad situation more generally: the long arm of the law, loneliness, isolation, or an ill-fated love affair. In Leadbelly’s GOATed railroad anthem “Midnight Special”, the movement of the train takes on a deeper, spiritual symbolism. Leadbelly wrote the song from the inside of a Texas penitentiary where each night, a train headed from Houston to the west coast go by at around midnight, shining its lights over the prison buildings as it went. The inmates believed that any person illuminated by its passing lights would be the next one released, and the song envisages the train (the Midnight Special) as a sort of divine oracle:
Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me,
Let the Midnight Special shine her ever lovin’ light on me.
One had better not get carried away listening to this kind of music though. It’s too easy to fall into the quicksand of the imagination while staring out a train window. No drifting off into ideation about having hopped a freight train travelling across the Mississippi Delta. You’re on the Great Western Railway – stay woke. Generally speaking, however, train journeys are the prime time to indulge in the pleasures of daydreaming, fantasising even (sexual or non). Psychoanalysts, beginning with none other than Sigmund Freud, in fact associated sensations linked to train travel with sexuality. In 1906, Freud wrote that the connection between the two derives from the pleasurable sensations of shaking and bumping up and down that one experiences as a train rattles along tracks (train travel having since gotten smoother perhaps makes this no longer applicable). In the event of repression of sexuality, one will therefore experience anxiety when confronted with train travel. From this hypothesis one could draw the inference that anyone who instead enjoys trains is, on the other hand, really sexually liberated. WOOOOO I LOVE TRAINS!!!!!!
Tolstoy hated trains. He wrote to Turgenev in 1857: “the railroad is to travel as a whore is to love”. All to say he disapproved of the sort of movement they facilitated, thought the world should be slower, branding the train as an evil temptress threatening to lure people into The Fast Life which he believed to be unhealthy and incompatible with the human condition. RIP Tolstoy you would have hated it here. In Anna Karenina the railroad is a central symbol of industrialisation and encroaching modernity. It is meant to be viewed as a destructive force, something which initiates a downwards spiral into death and devastation, foreshadowing the tragic saga that is Anna and Vronsky’s love affair. It all begins when the couple first meet at a train station and ends when Anna eventually commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. As she jumps, she has an immediate change of heart (she doesn't want to die), but it is already too late. And in the same way - there’s no turning the tides of modernity. First they build the railroads, next thing you know, there’s Elon Musk and his Teslas, roadmen on electric scooters, kids flying drones in the park instead of kites and, soon, robot Uber drivers and tiny miniature iPhones built into our eyes and brains! It’s like Jesus said in Matthew 24:3-8: “All these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet” (verse 6), “All these are the beginning of sorrows” (verse 8).
With the advancement of technology trains are now objects of nostalgia. By now we have built bigger, better, newer, faster; a 21st century rewriting of Anna Karenina would end with her being run over by a self-driving Tesla or celebrity private jet. Given – trains today are not the same as they were; they are far less romantic than the steam locomotives of yore. I imagine it would be much nicer to drift away to the chugging lull of a stream engine than the whizzing whir of electric power. But as far as modern vehicles are concerned, trains are now the nice guys. They emit around 66 to 80 percent less carbon than cars and planes and bring a lot of joy to a number of autistic people.[1] Trains today are very unlikely to run off the rails or explode and catch fire; steam engines, you see, although more sexy, are far more hazardous. A safety dispute between British rail regulators and the operator of Scotland’s famed “Harry Potter” steam engine threatens to prevent the trains from running next year. THERE’S NOTHING THEY WON’T TAKE FROM US!!! 11 August 1968 was the date the last ever steam-hauled service train chugged along the British Railways network. The same evening the BBC broadcast a documentary (4472 – Flying Scotsman) commemorating the end of what had been an integral feature of British life for over 140 years. The documentary ends with the camera silently panning across a scrapyard filled with hundreds of sad, retired steam locomotives - viewer discretion advised.
We are currently on the precipice of an entirely different kind of watershed in British train history, as anyone who is familiar with the Labour Party agenda will know:
‘Labour's plan is to deliver a unified and simplified rail system that relentlessly focuses on securing improved services for passengers and better value for money for taxpayers.’
I wonder if it will be cheaper to ride the Great Western Railway. I wonder if they will make trains sexy again.
[1] Trains can be categorised into different models, types, sizes, etc. and lots of people with ASD enjoy organising objects into categories. They also come with schedules, appealing to some people with ASD’s need for predictability and tendency to memorise and recite information.