Let’s Talk! – On the Train

Have you switched off your screens, already, to ponder or discuss another prompt from my friend, author Tyrean Martinson’s book, A Pocket Sized Jumble of 500+ Writing Prompts? Maybe you would like to read my take on it? Well, here it is.

My very first memory of traveling on a train was from my German native town to the Baltic Sea. Stuttgart main station was crowded that night as my family of four boarded the night train with a sleeping cabin all to ourselves. I was utterly excited. Too excited to sleep, at first. I remember sitting up in my berth and staring out of the window. The landscape at night seemed to hold magic as it rushed past the window, the bright moon a constant in the sky, hovering above villages, fields, and forests.

Other train travels that deeply impressed me took my family through the river Rhine gorge with its steep vineyards, romantic castles and ruins, and dreamy villages or busy small-towns. I’d enjoy that trip years later again and again, when I traveled to the North Sea every other year to seek cure for my hay fever. I loved that stretch of the trip especially well. Unfortunately, traffic development sped up things over time. What once was a slow trip with stop-overs at every small train station became a fast-track version and – to my utter disappointment an even faster one that, today, cuts out the gorge entirely. The last time when I wanted to show the gorge to my husband, we were rushing through industrial parks on the high plateau, instead, and had a long stop-over in an utterly uninspiring middle of nowhere.

I have no idea whether even the old-fashioned restaurants on these trains still exist. They used to deck the tables with white table cloths. There was china, glassware, and metal cutlery. The menu held options for three-course dinners or, depending on the time of day, breakfast or coffee and cake. The last times I traveled on the train, there was a board bistro that was closed, and instead, a conductor went through with a trolley of food options that were as fast as the train’s speed.

Needless to say – train travels in Germany have lost their magic to me. Maybe the regional trains are still the one option to explore landscapes, as they are still almost an equivalent to the once sung milk trains. You get to see small-towns or the suburbs of cities that otherwise you might not even get through.

Here in the U.S., I have enjoyed only two train trips, so far. One was when the Amtrac panoramic trains still ran on the BNSF tracks by the shoreline between Tacoma and the Nisqually Reach. It was very old-fashioned with handwritten seat reservations and actual ticket stubs. We loved it, and the views of the islands in Puget Sound were simply gorgeous. So was the train station on Lacey, a pretty place that was clean and inviting.

The train trip that was even more fun, though, came as an entire surprise to me. My husband gave it to me on a Mother’s Day years ago. We boarded an old steam train in the small-town of Elbe, WA, and sat in a train carriage with tables for two and beautifully upkept turn-of-the century décor (I’m talking that of the 19th/20th century, of course!), gilded mirrors, wallpaper, and fringed curtains included. I don’t remember the food – I know we had some. The atmosphere on the train was festive – everybody enjoyed the ride the old-fashioned way. Our destination was a museum in Mineral, WA. Rural landscape swept past the windows. We crossed brooks and rivers in dense forests with even denser underbrush. We were transported not just across miles but across the ages.

These days, we see that the Light Link train tracks get extended from Seattle towards the South more and more. As car traffic jams up the roads, the old way of traveling, even if it’s just for commutes, becomes more and more attractive again. And if everybody finds a seat, it is also sure to be way more relaxed than sitting on the asphalt stuck between construction and road rage.