AA Gill is away

The imagination is like a runaway train, writes AA Gill.

I’m writing this on the train. I don’t like writing on trains – the view keeps moving. The one piece of advice I can offer to aspiring writers is never, ever have a desk facing a window. When you look up, you should see only your thoughts. A moving window is not writer’s block, but writer’s tourniquet. The panorama wraps itself around your imagination, strangling ideas. (Actually, there’s one other piece of advice – say everything you write out loud. Not muttering to yourself like a Shakespearean actor rehearsing Henry V. Though I don’t recommend that on a train, either.) I particularly like the view from trains. There’s something about them that flatters a landscape. Or perhaps they just don’t scare it. The country just doesn’t look like it’s running away or hiding as it does from motorways. The land trusts railway lines; it comes right up to the rails.

As he rides one of the oldest lines in the world, AA Gill observes that train travel alters the landscape in ways both subtle and profound.

I’m travelling from London Euston to Penrith in Cumbria. The train will go on to Glasgow. This is one of the oldest lines in the world, purposefully chugging through towns that were made by the railway – and, in turn, made things that made railways necessary. Trains have been making this journey for over a hundred years; the railway is as much part of the landscape as the trees and the fields that run beside it. It is older than most of the buildings that come to meet it. The railway has both made and been incorporated into the land. So it seems not just part of the natural order, but if you look across a landscape and see a railway, it is the natural order, aesthetically harmonious, a punctuation. Railways in Europe created the land they serve. In the 19th century, the railway was navigated north through rural England. It followed the old Great North Road.

The engineers looked for a regional stop and naturally chose Stamford, an ancient market town and coaching stop built on a Roman road. It was the obvious place. Surrounded by the most fertile and prosperous farmland, home to Stilton and Melton Mowbray pies and haslet. But Stamford was also surrounded, and mostly owned, by a local nob who said, “You’re not driving that damn filthy mechanical thing through my rolling acres, bringing all those unwashed, uninvited, unsavoury, unwanted common people into my town.” So the railway said fine, and they built their station in a small village just outside his fiefdom. No one had ever heard of it. The stop on the east-coast line was built on a place called Peterborough. And today, Peterborough is a city, with a population of about 200,000. Stamford, meanwhile, snoozes in an economic decrepitude. It’s got a pretty church, and a lot of pubs and about 21,000 souls. There is a small railway there which you can take to Peterborough.

It’s an obvious truism that the means of travel change the places you travel to.

They can even invent the places you travel to. But there is something particular and peculiar about the railway. It is the herald of the modern age. Before the railway, no one had ever travelled faster than a horse could gallop, if you don’t count those who fell off cliffs. Railways were almost immediately romantic. They took ordinary folk from handmade, slow, isolated lives into ones crammed with possibility. The building of railways around the world are heroic stories of nation-forging. The great race to join up America across the prairies and the Rockies, with the creation of Chicago as the queen of plains, encouraging its stockyards that contained the cattle brought up from the south-west by rail and then sent by more rails as beef to New York, where they pretty much invented our idea of steak.

The railway opened up Latin America and Canada and made British investors titanic fortunes. The Indian railway is the

second biggest employer in the world, after the Chinese army. And the European rail network whose immutable timetable forced the German invasion of Belgium and France and the First World War.

Train journeys rattle in smoke, in romance, history and stories. Almost from their conception, they were worked into Victorian novels and from there into films and country and Western songs. As a travel writer, I’m regularly asked to take rail journeys, which are meant to be moving destinations. They save you from really going anywhere; you’re just taking a train. The favourite of these is the Orient Express, where you can dress up like an Agatha Christie character, and the Trans-Siberian Express, a week of mind-numbing boredom with the endless steppe to nowhere, and when you get out you have to get on an aeroplane and fly home.

Railways inspire a particular low form of nerdiness. I know that wonks are now fashionable and occasionally attractive. But there’s a long way to go before you feel a twinge of excitement discovering that you’re sitting next to a trainspotter. Railways and ships are the two forms of travel where the journey is commensurately as exciting as the destination. But there has to be a destination.

In my case, it’s a literary festival on the lakes. There and back to London in a day. I wouldn’t have done it if it had been a flight or a car journey. But the idea of six hours on a train has its attractions. I can work and read, but mostly I can watch the landscape slide past.

This is the best of England. The Pennines have a dusting of snow, there are daffodils along the track and the fields are speckled with ewes and new lambs. I’ve just passed the line where the hedges of the south are replaced by the dry stone walls of the north. Great trees stand alone in undulating fields and occasionally you see a solitary figure going about some silent rural pursuit who stands and stares at the rhythmic clatter of the passing train, still after all this time a thing that forces you to stop and watch, to tell children to make a wish. The train is a harbinger of effort and endeavour, of adventure and obligation. A loaded jewel box carrying the mind to exceptional stories in rhythm, and businessmen on their phones shouting, “I’m on the train.”