Long journey into night: travelling by train after dark is a bleak experience
There is a peculiar horror to taking the train at night. Real sleeper trains are fine, but those later hours on a normal train in winter, after the evening rush hour, are the ghastliest time to travel.
The carriages empty out, leaving nothing but a black reflection of themselves in the gaping windows. There you are, tunnelling blindly into the dark at breakneck speed, with nothing familiar to anchor the senses.
If you press your brow to the window, you see only flashes: mean, little red lights in the distance, the interrogatory blaze of floodlights, the hooded wink of a lamppost and the dismal, orange triangles of light striped along platforms as you hurtle past, where cold people wait with pinched expressions. Occasionally, a train rips past going the other way, its windows flickering like an old kinetoscope where you half-expect to glimpse a murder in the last carriage.
Inside the train, you are bathed in the merciless glare of fluorescent strip lights as if waiting endlessly in a poorly lit hospital, blinding and gloomy all at once. Everything is shades of grey, except for the piercing green dots denoting rows and rows of unreserved seats: “Available.” “Available.” “Available.” There is an odd feeling of being watched, because the few passengers who are there can all see each other mirrored in the windows, like a panopticon.
That reflection is the worst of it all. It creates a shadow version of the carriage that presses down on you, inescapable and claustrophobic, as if everything is falling inwards, the two reflections and the real thing forming three mundane, meaningless realities both splitting and colliding into one.
It’s not for nothing that
The carriages empty out, leaving nothing but a black reflection of themselves
such journeys are priced at “off-peak” rates.
While I’m on the subject,
is it some kind of sick joke that prompts train operators to post the platform number just seconds before a train is due to leave during rush hour, so that hundreds of people are forced to rouse themselves into an immediate sprint for seats? What exactly are disabled or frail passengers meant to do? It raises the blood pressure every time.