Commuter Trains

“[...] its small squares of fast-passing light, the early evening windows of the lives of hundreds of others.”

                                      ― Ali Smith, The Whole Story and Other Stories

Yesterday evening I rode on the commuter train out to meet my husband to watch a folk band at a local ale house. The train returning from the ‘big city’ goes through farm country and across a wide working river. At each stop people in business suits and carrying briefcases disembarked and rushed to waiting cars, and home for the night.  This is an element of my place. My place is not a place where a lot of people can find work. They need to commute to the ‘big city’ to do so. And every evening they return from the big city to the small towns, including mine, from whence they have come.

It reminded me of when I was in middle school. On occasion (very often occasions) I would play hooky in the afternoon from school, not returning after having being home for lunch. My mother did not insist on my returning to school as she was lonely and loved the company, to watch the matinee movie – always at 1:00. The movies were almost all black and white. If they were not Westerns, then they were of an ilk that included scenes where husbands were seen off every morning, and collected every evening, from the commuter train.  This was not a culture of which I was at all aware, until here, in my place, the commuter train.

The culture of the commuter train is somewhat like a microcosm of society. With the prevalence of digital devices, there can be a whole car-load of people that do not interact with each other at all, but instead with their various i-this and i-that. But, conversely there is also the reverse, as described by John Clammer,, a professor, in Train Culture: the Sociology of Tracks. He speaks of how the same people who routinely catch commuter trains tend to form interactions, but that these relationships dissolve when the train reaches its terminal and the crowd swarms off. He says that some of these interactions lead to long-term social relationships with others, including chess playing, But it is all ephemeral. Society is ephemeral.

I am not a regular train commuter. This instance was simply an efficient means to get from point A to point B with no car. Though I enjoyed watching the sociology of trains that was going on around me for a time, I soon turned to the scenery as it rushed past the windows. The commuter train is simply an aspect of my place, but one that does not fit well with the ‘sense’ of my place, whereas the passing scenery did. There are rules to train-riding and relationships. My relationship with the land that passed me has no parameters.

My place from a train window: