Guest Blogger

Below you will find a guest train blog by Aparajita. Readers may enjoy the contrast between Aparajita’s blog posts and my own. Whereas my focus is on sharing objective information and facts about the train routes, Aparajita’s focus is more subjective in nature, exploring the human emotion associated with train travel.

PART 1: This summer – a cold Tuesday morning

I’ve often wondered, how far can I go, if I were to borrow hobbies? Last week, my mind ran this question on overdrive as I stood shivering on an abandoned ruined railway platform somewhere in downtown Pittsburgh. Massively underdressed for the occasion, and characteristically overstocked with a Hindi-USA blanket for all impossible possibilities, I carried my baggage on feet that were barely supported by a flimsy pair of white flip-flops.

Oh enough with the hyperboles, Aparajita! You weren’t in the middle of nowhere; you were at the Pittsburg Union Station – the same station that has seen more tonnes of steel being transported on its tracks than there were phytoplankton in the seas in the 1950s. And you weren’t alone traversing through some dreary setting facing an existential crisis that will somehow make Pennsylvania your Algeria – no no – you were surrounded by at least 200 other people, half of whom had just gotten off the train that you were supposed board in a few minutes! So, enough with the dishonest brooding – you weren’t alone, and you weren’t cold (It was peak summer for God’s sake)! 

Oh of course, the train! The same train that was 2 hours late to pick me up! Can you believe it, late to pick ME up?! Cold and frustrated with time delays that many believe are products of a conspiracy to destroy and obliterate the American public transportation system, I was, yet again for the 100^th time, hit in the face with the harsh reality that the world doesn’t resolve around me (oh the horror! the horror, the horror!), and that American trains have no regard for my schedules. So, dear Aparajita, even as I was surrounded by 200 human people, I was betrayed by a piece of metal that I had put all my faith and trust into, and I felt truly alone as I stood shivering with anger on the Amtrak Boarding area of the Pittsburg Union Station – right, you heard me – I stood seething with controlled rage as I looked out into the fog surrounding the big empty UNCARING and ICY Union Station.

And all that time, I wondered – I wondered over and over again – how far could I go if I were to rely on borrowed hobbies? Oh well, Ostia Antica is beautiful because it’s worn out, and American trains are nothing less than a colossal Roman wreck – magnificent and defunct – so maybe, I could get pretty far relying on borrowed hobbies.

Now, my dear reader, please do not misunderstand my intentions. I did not mean to start this blog series [?] (I imagine I’ll be writing a lot about my one day train adventure and my trip of a lifetime where I met a very important friend [let’s call him Duke Orsino]) to document my grievances against Amtrak. Instead, the purpose of this series is to talk about my first unaccompanied journey. Yes, yes, at the age of 23, I travelled alone to some other city for leisure for the very first time. (And they say that personal growth is difficult to achieve!) It was a short expedition, less than 48 hours to be somewhat precise, but I did learn a lot about people, and about myself, in those few hours.  

As I’ve been taught over the past year, I must now tell you that in this blog series I will argue that my train journey from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, and my subsequent adventures in DC, were opportunities for me to observe, examine, and understand human existence in greater detail. In that regard, I will address three main points: 1. Trains are an incredible mode of transportation to escape the tyranny of time 2. Ozymandias is a flawed poem 3. Loss aversion is a reality even in matters relating to human relationships and the heart.

All that and much more, stay tuned to find out more about my adventures across the pond – courtesy my friend Jackie, from whom I borrowed her hobby.

Readers will note Aparajita’s frustration, or ‘controlled rage’ to adopt her language, in relation to the Amtrak delays. Toward the end of her post, however, Aparajita wisely observes that ‘trains are an incredible mode of transportation to escape the tyranny of time’. One wonders whether Aparajita will ultimately be able to reconcile her apparent rejection of the tyranny of time once on board the train with her lingering preoccupation with the train’s timely arrival. Perhaps her next blog post will answer this question for us all.

PART 2: Trains and Time 

If there were one red thread that connected all Indians, it would be a massive steel caterpillar hurtling through our country, covering all there was to be covered, kilometer-by-kilometer. Trains. They occupy a special place in our collective imagination – our modern myths, our silly comics (think Tinkle and Champak), our stories of the freedom struggle, and our darkest tales of violence and bloodshed; our lives unceasingly revolve around Trains – happily and fervently, we dance to their rumbling rhythms and whistling sounds. So, even though I’ve never been on a proper train journey, I felt strangely assured as I took my first steps towards the Capitol, all because I was fairly certain that soon enough I’d be enveloped in a familiar space that is a relic of my very own variety of cultural capital. 

Now, for those of you who’ve already read Jackie’s Blog, or those of you that have travelled on American trains before, you probably already know what an Amtrak train looks like. It’s a mammoth creature with outlandishly large and oddly dull interiors and its aesthetic seems predominantly inspired by its first home – a factory. Ah the cloudy greys and dirty navy blues! I’m not sure what black magic was at work but as I sat in my assigned seat, I was bustling with delight at the sheer beauty of my bleak surroundings. Maybe it was the early hour of the morning, brightly lit by a sole red bulb, or maybe it were the people around me and their silhouettes of all shapes and sizes – something about my setting couldn’t help but force me to look forward to the rest of my day. 

That anticipatory excitement hardly lasted for less than 10 minutes, because the greatest tragedies of our modern lives hit me when I asked the Conductor about the on-board Wi-Fi. He said “we don’t have Wi-Fi on this train,” and I almost fainted. A pack of wolves howled somewhere in the distance, angels wept, it rained, and the cabin suddenly seemed to me a lot more lacklustre than it was a few seconds before the communication of the calamitous news. Logistically, how was I now supposed to update my family about my whereabouts – they knew I was on the train, but did they know that I was alive? Of course they didn’t –because I hadn’t confirmed that fact with them via texts updates which my mother has ordered me to send to her every 30 minutes. My parents have read enough train themed murder mysteries to be cautious of the dangers associated with such locomotive means, and I was very sure that they’d be calling 911 should they not hear from me soon. Also, how was I now going to fulfill one of the primary purposes of my trip and parade it live on all kinds of social media and inspire jealousy in some of my closest friends? Oh an absolute disaster this was turning out to be!

Devoid of my basic human rights (See Judgment 12790 of the Supreme Court of Costa Rica,) I resorted to begging my fellow passengers for their phones so that I could make a call to my mother. I first asked some friendly looking passengers, then the Conductor, and then, after receiving my fair share of glares and ‘no’s’, my seatmate, who took pity on me and allowed me to send one text from his phone. The absolutely harrowing experience that I had as I navigated the graphic interface of his smartphone is a story that deserves to be narrated at another time – for now, all that needs to be said is that I failed at my mission, and now I sat trapped in a pewter box, half crying and marginally panicked imagining the 8 hours of imprisonment that were to follow. 

Oh how superbly wrong I was! It wasn’t an 8-hour wait, it was 10! 

And more importantly, I wasn’t really trapped at all. With “nothing to do” (that I could also have done anywhere else in the world with a fully functional phone), I felt obligated to at least look out the window and stare into the mist to make some use of my time.  I did this for around four hours – I carefully observed our voyage alongside rivers and tributaries and I bid farewell to countless mountains and trees in the process. I made no notes, I hardly took any photos (except for the ones reproduced here), and I didn’t philosophize as to what my acts of observation meant. I simply looked as far and as deep in the forest as I could and stopped. For all my grand affiliations with the Romantics, my interactions with my natural environment always have predominantly been my subjects for some kind of conjecturing and analyses – they’ve always had some higher purpose. So, my mindless gazing into nothingness during on this train trip was a welcome change. Now I could write more about all the ways in which this was important, but honestly, wouldn’t that defeat the point that I’m trying to make? Or maybe I’m just being lazy here?  I’ll leave it up to you, my dear reader, to decide why I will not pursue this idea further. 

After 4 hours of staring, I started to lose tack of my time on the train. At some point, I decided to relocate my belongings and myself to the Observation Car/Lounge (which is a fancy term for a cabin with glass ceilings of the literal kind). Soon, I was playing card games with a family from Iowa and a professor from Chicago who taught me all about the different pizza related rivalries in America. I don’t recall when, but sometime in between sneakily ogling at Amish people (and trying to determine who exactly they were) and accusing one of my fellow players of not being well versed in the diverse rules of UNO, I felt like I had been travelling on this train forever. Earlier this year, when I was trying to convince my friend “Dumple” to spend more time with me, I had come across some (fairly obvious) research, which said that institutions and self-contained spaces foster better friendships, partly because we experience time differently in such spaces. Perhaps the same was the case for my time on the train – maybe I experienced time differently while I was on board – not because my phone had run out of battery and I actually couldn’t see what time it was, but because time appeared to slow down and move at a glacial pace (much like our beloved Amtrak train) as we traversed through unnamed and unknown territories. So, my Dear Reader, in addition to transporting me to DC, my very defunct train also managed to perform one other kind of transportation, and it rescued me and my fellow passengers, for a brief period, from the clutches of man-made Time as it transported us into a world of our own. 

That’s all. 

Oh, and for those of you that are wondering, I did manage to make one quick call to my friend Duke Orsino, thanks to my friend from Chicago. 

See you next time when I return with the 3^rd part of my train series and talk more about my arrival in DC, and my adventures with my friend the Duke. Stay tuned!