I remember first encountering threads of Jennings’ train observations on Twitter, each one compact and warm as a palmed coin. But I don’t remember when I encountered them; an attempt at locating my first reply to such threads led me to finding some tweets from 2019, but I feel certain I’ve been haunted by the insight and perfection of her vignettes for much longer than that. At any rate, I’m overjoyed to be able to hold them in my hand.
I was surprised by how struck-through I felt reading the Table of Contents, though. There she actually names the journeys in question, citing train stations and routes that became very familiar to me while I lived in the southwest of England between 2008-2012. I had, I think, imagined that Jennings’ train journeys were all one, a single train slipping from landscape to landscape like thread through a necklace. To see the specificity was a kind of warning to guard my heart against the journey the book would take me on, through places and memories softened and sharpened by time and distance.
I’m no less excited to read it; probably only more so.
Travel and cities are much on my mind, for all the obvious reasons as well as perhaps less obvious ones. My husband is reading The Power Broker right now, and periodically shares out portions of stunningly beautiful writing about glaciers carving up the landscape that would become Long Island (in a book ostensibly about Robert Moses; one begins to understand why it’s 1246 pages long). And on Wednesday evening next week, I’ll be in conversation with Annalee Newitz about their most recent book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, under the auspices of the New York Public Library. It’s a free event open to the public; you just have to register for it in advance.
In the meantime, I’d love it if you could tell me about particularly memorable travel you’ve done between cities. I’ve been reflecting on the journey from Glasgow to Cornwall and back by car with Stu, and the small farewell tour of Cornwall and Devon that entailed; the ferry between Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard, and the winding car journeys preceding it, from Ottawa through Boston; the train journey from Glasgow to Inverness and back. I’d love to know of your own journeys — the restaurants you stopped at, the landscapes you saw, the music you listened to.
I've always loved trains. It helps to have grown up in and around one of the only places in the USA with something like a reasonable rail-based mass transit infrastructure. But my year in Japan was train heaven. It's not even the longer journeys, like the Shinkansen bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo (two hours and change, reliably to the second), though watching Mt. Fuji whizz by at 320 kph was a delight...the shorter journeys, such as taking the Hankyu Electric Rail from the Mikage neighborhood I lived in, through Osaka Central Station, to the Kyobashi station where my office was...every day.
I drove a friend when they were relocating from San Francisco to New York and needed someone licensed and prepared to drive a Penske truck coast to coast. So I got to spend a week in the company of one of my favourite people, and they got to play me a lot of music, including an early version of Avenue Q.
Even though it was mostly Interstates, it was a fascinating way to see the landscape across America change and get a sense of the sheer size of the country. My native Britain is tiny.
Also, it was in February, so there was a lot of snow crossing the Rockies and when we arrived in New York.
Also also, I did some birdwatching on the way and saw a night heron in Chincoteague and a flock of scoters on Chesapeake Bay. And if you're wondering why we were crossing Chesapeake Bay while driving from SF to NY, it was to indulge my love of impressive civil engineering projects.
Gosh, I miss trains so much. They are always delayed, there's always a problem (at least when riding Ye Olde Amtrak), but the comfort of sitting in flux as the world goes by is always worth it. I'm thinking now of the train trip I took in college from NYC to South Hadley, Massachusetts, to visit my best friend. I was in the midst of an intensely low period, and I almost cancelled the trip, but I genuinely think the journey might have saved my life. Everything that felt impossible seemed to melt away the farther we got from the city, and I hadn't realized how badly I needed to see green. I did homework on the way there, and the essay that had been causing me so much anxiety finally seemed doable!! (Reading Judith Butler when you're depressed is hard, ok). Visiting my friend was healing, too, but what I most remember is the train trips there and back, and how much I needed that quiet time alone to sit, to think, to read and work without mental illness clawing into me. I read Nella Larsen's QUICKSAND on the way back, which was also for school, but it spoke to me in a way that made me feel a bit less alone. Trains!! They're good for that.
At the tail end of 2000, during my first year of college, I took a train from Mississippi to Boston to visit my long-distance girlfriend. It was a two-day trip, the longest I'd ever taken alone. The first leg was the Crescent. It landed in my hometown early-early, having come from New Orleans in the middle of the night. I had taken this leg before, on a school trip in the sixth grade to Washington, DC. This time, I would hop trains in DC and take the Northeast Regional to NYC, stop over for an hour or so, then take another tain to Boston.
The Crescent had a dining car. In the middle of the night, finding it difficult to sleep comfortably in the cramped seats that had felt much larger at age eleven, I decided to walk down and see if they were still offering anything. I like walking on trains in motion. I grew up sailing with my father. An unsteady deck feels welcome and nostalgic. Every step involves a little bit of trust that the craft will be there to meet you.
The dining car was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke. Four old men with thick New Orleans accents occupied the corner booth, playing cards and cackling. A bleary-eyed businessman, jacketless, tie dangling, pulled at his coffee and read a USA Today. A woman and her young child sat at a two-person table at the end of the line of booths. The fare on offer was more "what can I microwave for you" than I'd expected. It jarred me. I realized that the dining car had cast me back into books and stories from elders from a time long before I was born. Once I realized it, I didn't want to betray that magic, so I asked for a muffin and a cup of coffee. I sat at the counter, several seats down from the man struggling to read about Bush v. Gore, and watched the card game from the corner of my eye. I outlasted the businessman and the woman and child, but I packed it in long before the men in the corner.
I don't remember much of the rest of the train ride--I slept all the way from DC to New York--but I remember how that night felt, like I was doing something As An Adult, and doing it in a space outside of the normal passage of time.
It's funny--for you, it's those trains in England. For me, it's those trains in New England! I've seen some of those very same sights! Those thoughts--drenched in color and myth as they are--might have been mine, except I know they weren't. But I remember some of the original tweets, just watching them fly by--was I perhaps on a train at the time--and feeling that Yes Yes Yes in my heart! When we did our Travelogues reading to celebrate Kathleen, Carlos and Mir were our Conductors. And all the participants (if they cared to) took turns reading stanzas. Voices from around the world! It felt like being on a train.
Trains are a beautiful and delightful thing I wish we took more often. Our best and worst journeys:
The worst was a tie. Emotionally, a 17 hr bus journey from Savannah to DC, after visiting a long distance significant other during college, only to have broken up immediately on arrival. A near week spent in southern heat while just wrecked. And then it’s very hard to be travel-stoic and pleasant in public when you feel like crying every five minutes and are surrounded by strangers.
The worst logistically, but the best landscape wise was probably our 21 hr train journey from Oakland to Seattle. For those who haven’t done this, you start off around 8 pm amid urban lights and pause sometime around dawn as they stop in Klamath Falls, OR. You’ve passed California in the dark to wake amid snow-capped mountain peaks and morning foggy was, both inside and out. It’s very magical, and we loved that and should have appreciated it more except the door between our car and the next was stuck open all night, with freezing drafts and loud irregular noises gusting in. We couldn’t sleep a wink for those ten hours or so. It was awful to see nothing outside and still be unable to sleep or focus due to sleepiness. From the midway stop onto Seattle was an amazing ride through mountains and past lakes and we spent most of it in the observation car drinking bad coffee to stay up. In Portland the stop was just long enough to run and get donuts. Sometime around sunset we came through the Olympia/Tacoma region to the most absurdly, gut-wrenchingly spectacular vistas of islands in fjords and open water. It was utterly breathtaking and I want to do that part again. The trip was our first time in the PNW and it’s held onto our hearts ever since. Half awful night trapped in noise and cold and half lovely adventure. Ended in spending a week with cousins and eating our weight in salmon.
The only drive that comes close was up Rte 1 from SF to the mouth of the Russian River during September for a wedding. The beaches and cliffs in the fog were amazing.
When I was a young reporter, working in Moncton, New Brunswick, my newsroom was a 7-minute walk from the CN railroad station. I couldn't drive, so when I wanted to visit my family in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, I used the train to get from Moncton to Halifax, where my mother would meet me and drive back home. This trip, taken several times a year, would start after work ended on Friday. I'd haul my suitcase to work and then to the depot.
The train would pull out of the station around 5:30 p.m. I'd have about 45 until the dining car was open for supper. I'd read and look out the window at the beautiful, brushy flat wild of southern New Brunswick until the meal call came. The dining tables had linen tablecloths and serviettes, the dishes were china, the menu was small but good - oh, for those long-ago gracious days - and I would eat leisurely, as the landscape went by.
At the time, it took about four hours to go by train from Moncton to Halifax. In summer, the light lasted well into the evening, and I wouldn't be able to read much, because the landscape would call to me. In the fall, there was still light for at least an hour after supper. It was during those trips that I realized how gorgeous the fall colors were - colors I'd previously thought of as dull. On those train trips, I started thinking of how the dull reds and browns would translate to rich velvets gowns. From that moment, I saw those dun and brick and dull gold colors as beautiful.
One of the other things I always remember about those four hour train journeys is the time I *did* have to read as we headed to our destination. It was during one of those journeys that I read a David Gerrold novel that was the final argument in my soul for a major change in my spiritual worldview. Had I not had the quiet car, the landscape outside, and the gentle rolling of the train itself as my environment, I believe I would not have come to the decision I did. So yes, a four hour train journey between Moncton and Halifax, taken many times decades ago, was life enriching and life changing. I'll always love trains.
I love that the ferry between Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyard is special for you, too. :)
We've driven through the very, very middle of the US multiple times now to visit family. There's this one spot in Oklahoma, and geologic formation - an escarpment perhaps? - where you drive up to the top and then there is a line of giant wind turbines, stretching into the distance, both east and west. I think of Don Quixote and windmills when we pass, and I like to imagine that we are traveling through a meeting of many, many kind and brave giants.
There is also a delightful Swedish diner in Lindsborg, Kansas, that's worth the 20 minutes you have to drive out of your way to reach.
I often think of the drive back from Ottawa to Portland ME last year after CanCon. After going through Montreal, we left the main highways and were on small roads through increasingly remote-feeling Quebec and New Hampshire. The scenery was lovely, lakes, mountains, and forest, and I loved driving through that wildernessy area that I had never been through (despite its closeness), and then beginning to reenter familiar rural Maine territory about an hour before getting home. Such a nice drive, I hope we get a chance to come back to Canada soon! :’)
I remember the journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and back, in 2005. It was my first time traveling between the cities, despite having lived in Russia for the first decade of my life. I remember the stark difference between the cities -- the Old capital and the New, as they are called -- and our traveling companions, a Russian couple who were very interested in what life is like in America, and shared back a lot of amazing, disturbing stories from their own life, including the husband's time serving in the Chechen War in early 2000s.
I've always loved trains. It helps to have grown up in and around one of the only places in the USA with something like a reasonable rail-based mass transit infrastructure. But my year in Japan was train heaven. It's not even the longer journeys, like the Shinkansen bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo (two hours and change, reliably to the second), though watching Mt. Fuji whizz by at 320 kph was a delight...the shorter journeys, such as taking the Hankyu Electric Rail from the Mikage neighborhood I lived in, through Osaka Central Station, to the Kyobashi station where my office was...every day.
I miss trains so much.
I drove a friend when they were relocating from San Francisco to New York and needed someone licensed and prepared to drive a Penske truck coast to coast. So I got to spend a week in the company of one of my favourite people, and they got to play me a lot of music, including an early version of Avenue Q.
Even though it was mostly Interstates, it was a fascinating way to see the landscape across America change and get a sense of the sheer size of the country. My native Britain is tiny.
Also, it was in February, so there was a lot of snow crossing the Rockies and when we arrived in New York.
Also also, I did some birdwatching on the way and saw a night heron in Chincoteague and a flock of scoters on Chesapeake Bay. And if you're wondering why we were crossing Chesapeake Bay while driving from SF to NY, it was to indulge my love of impressive civil engineering projects.
Gosh, I miss trains so much. They are always delayed, there's always a problem (at least when riding Ye Olde Amtrak), but the comfort of sitting in flux as the world goes by is always worth it. I'm thinking now of the train trip I took in college from NYC to South Hadley, Massachusetts, to visit my best friend. I was in the midst of an intensely low period, and I almost cancelled the trip, but I genuinely think the journey might have saved my life. Everything that felt impossible seemed to melt away the farther we got from the city, and I hadn't realized how badly I needed to see green. I did homework on the way there, and the essay that had been causing me so much anxiety finally seemed doable!! (Reading Judith Butler when you're depressed is hard, ok). Visiting my friend was healing, too, but what I most remember is the train trips there and back, and how much I needed that quiet time alone to sit, to think, to read and work without mental illness clawing into me. I read Nella Larsen's QUICKSAND on the way back, which was also for school, but it spoke to me in a way that made me feel a bit less alone. Trains!! They're good for that.
At the tail end of 2000, during my first year of college, I took a train from Mississippi to Boston to visit my long-distance girlfriend. It was a two-day trip, the longest I'd ever taken alone. The first leg was the Crescent. It landed in my hometown early-early, having come from New Orleans in the middle of the night. I had taken this leg before, on a school trip in the sixth grade to Washington, DC. This time, I would hop trains in DC and take the Northeast Regional to NYC, stop over for an hour or so, then take another tain to Boston.
The Crescent had a dining car. In the middle of the night, finding it difficult to sleep comfortably in the cramped seats that had felt much larger at age eleven, I decided to walk down and see if they were still offering anything. I like walking on trains in motion. I grew up sailing with my father. An unsteady deck feels welcome and nostalgic. Every step involves a little bit of trust that the craft will be there to meet you.
The dining car was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke. Four old men with thick New Orleans accents occupied the corner booth, playing cards and cackling. A bleary-eyed businessman, jacketless, tie dangling, pulled at his coffee and read a USA Today. A woman and her young child sat at a two-person table at the end of the line of booths. The fare on offer was more "what can I microwave for you" than I'd expected. It jarred me. I realized that the dining car had cast me back into books and stories from elders from a time long before I was born. Once I realized it, I didn't want to betray that magic, so I asked for a muffin and a cup of coffee. I sat at the counter, several seats down from the man struggling to read about Bush v. Gore, and watched the card game from the corner of my eye. I outlasted the businessman and the woman and child, but I packed it in long before the men in the corner.
I don't remember much of the rest of the train ride--I slept all the way from DC to New York--but I remember how that night felt, like I was doing something As An Adult, and doing it in a space outside of the normal passage of time.
It's funny--for you, it's those trains in England. For me, it's those trains in New England! I've seen some of those very same sights! Those thoughts--drenched in color and myth as they are--might have been mine, except I know they weren't. But I remember some of the original tweets, just watching them fly by--was I perhaps on a train at the time--and feeling that Yes Yes Yes in my heart! When we did our Travelogues reading to celebrate Kathleen, Carlos and Mir were our Conductors. And all the participants (if they cared to) took turns reading stanzas. Voices from around the world! It felt like being on a train.
Trains are a beautiful and delightful thing I wish we took more often. Our best and worst journeys:
The worst was a tie. Emotionally, a 17 hr bus journey from Savannah to DC, after visiting a long distance significant other during college, only to have broken up immediately on arrival. A near week spent in southern heat while just wrecked. And then it’s very hard to be travel-stoic and pleasant in public when you feel like crying every five minutes and are surrounded by strangers.
The worst logistically, but the best landscape wise was probably our 21 hr train journey from Oakland to Seattle. For those who haven’t done this, you start off around 8 pm amid urban lights and pause sometime around dawn as they stop in Klamath Falls, OR. You’ve passed California in the dark to wake amid snow-capped mountain peaks and morning foggy was, both inside and out. It’s very magical, and we loved that and should have appreciated it more except the door between our car and the next was stuck open all night, with freezing drafts and loud irregular noises gusting in. We couldn’t sleep a wink for those ten hours or so. It was awful to see nothing outside and still be unable to sleep or focus due to sleepiness. From the midway stop onto Seattle was an amazing ride through mountains and past lakes and we spent most of it in the observation car drinking bad coffee to stay up. In Portland the stop was just long enough to run and get donuts. Sometime around sunset we came through the Olympia/Tacoma region to the most absurdly, gut-wrenchingly spectacular vistas of islands in fjords and open water. It was utterly breathtaking and I want to do that part again. The trip was our first time in the PNW and it’s held onto our hearts ever since. Half awful night trapped in noise and cold and half lovely adventure. Ended in spending a week with cousins and eating our weight in salmon.
The only drive that comes close was up Rte 1 from SF to the mouth of the Russian River during September for a wedding. The beaches and cliffs in the fog were amazing.
When I was a young reporter, working in Moncton, New Brunswick, my newsroom was a 7-minute walk from the CN railroad station. I couldn't drive, so when I wanted to visit my family in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, I used the train to get from Moncton to Halifax, where my mother would meet me and drive back home. This trip, taken several times a year, would start after work ended on Friday. I'd haul my suitcase to work and then to the depot.
The train would pull out of the station around 5:30 p.m. I'd have about 45 until the dining car was open for supper. I'd read and look out the window at the beautiful, brushy flat wild of southern New Brunswick until the meal call came. The dining tables had linen tablecloths and serviettes, the dishes were china, the menu was small but good - oh, for those long-ago gracious days - and I would eat leisurely, as the landscape went by.
At the time, it took about four hours to go by train from Moncton to Halifax. In summer, the light lasted well into the evening, and I wouldn't be able to read much, because the landscape would call to me. In the fall, there was still light for at least an hour after supper. It was during those trips that I realized how gorgeous the fall colors were - colors I'd previously thought of as dull. On those train trips, I started thinking of how the dull reds and browns would translate to rich velvets gowns. From that moment, I saw those dun and brick and dull gold colors as beautiful.
One of the other things I always remember about those four hour train journeys is the time I *did* have to read as we headed to our destination. It was during one of those journeys that I read a David Gerrold novel that was the final argument in my soul for a major change in my spiritual worldview. Had I not had the quiet car, the landscape outside, and the gentle rolling of the train itself as my environment, I believe I would not have come to the decision I did. So yes, a four hour train journey between Moncton and Halifax, taken many times decades ago, was life enriching and life changing. I'll always love trains.
I love that the ferry between Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyard is special for you, too. :)
We've driven through the very, very middle of the US multiple times now to visit family. There's this one spot in Oklahoma, and geologic formation - an escarpment perhaps? - where you drive up to the top and then there is a line of giant wind turbines, stretching into the distance, both east and west. I think of Don Quixote and windmills when we pass, and I like to imagine that we are traveling through a meeting of many, many kind and brave giants.
There is also a delightful Swedish diner in Lindsborg, Kansas, that's worth the 20 minutes you have to drive out of your way to reach.
I often think of the drive back from Ottawa to Portland ME last year after CanCon. After going through Montreal, we left the main highways and were on small roads through increasingly remote-feeling Quebec and New Hampshire. The scenery was lovely, lakes, mountains, and forest, and I loved driving through that wildernessy area that I had never been through (despite its closeness), and then beginning to reenter familiar rural Maine territory about an hour before getting home. Such a nice drive, I hope we get a chance to come back to Canada soon! :’)
Sorry for a late reply!
I remember the journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and back, in 2005. It was my first time traveling between the cities, despite having lived in Russia for the first decade of my life. I remember the stark difference between the cities -- the Old capital and the New, as they are called -- and our traveling companions, a Russian couple who were very interested in what life is like in America, and shared back a lot of amazing, disturbing stories from their own life, including the husband's time serving in the Chechen War in early 2000s.
If you're looking for a scenic train ride, travel from Germany to Switzerland.