Cheap Air travel has taken the romance out of travelling. First you have to wake up x hours earlier to travel to airport, then you have to be y hours before counter closes and z hours to reach your destination from airport, not counting the n hours by which flight is often delayed. Sometimes for some distances I feel it’s not worth travelling by air, train would have been better.
I remember travelling by train to my grandmothers place for vacation when I was young. It started with filling the railway concession forms at school, then going with dad and standing in long queue to get the tickets, the last minute reshuffling and decisions of the date on which to travel due to unavailability of tickets, the triumph on face when we left ticket window with tickets in hand and the dejection when we didn’t and this was just the start of the fun. The endless wait for that day to arrive and the preparations, packing of bags, deciding who is responsible for which bags, fighting amongst us siblings to carry the fanciest bag no matter how heavy it was.
That was / is one good thing about train travel “no weight limits” now when we pack our bags for air travel we have to keep the bathroom scale ready for reckoning the weight (in absence of weighing scales calling in the neighbour/ or friend who is good at guessing weights by picking them up for a brief second), hoping that the scales at counter will show same weight.
Coming back to trains, reaching the nearest railway station on time (thats yet another advantage of train travel) the rush to find out on which platform the train was due on, then trying to find out where the bogey you were reserved in would halt. That was a mad rush of adrenal when we saw the train arrive and as always the bogey (in which you had reservation) stopping few meters away from designated position and finally getting in the train just in time when train started moving, waving people good bye and finally settling on your seats on which there was always somebody sitting.
Once settled in, there was fight for window seat amongst the children, finally the winner (randomly selected by the parent who was counting and busy placing the bags under the seats or on top tier so they won’t get stolen) got to see other trains moving by.
Eating dinner (as often it was overnight travel to our grandmothers place) once train was out of city was next on agenda. It was fun eating out of a newspaper, the food always tasted better while travelling, there were fights and allegations of someone drinking too much of the limited drinking water we carried, the promise of our father to fill up the bottle at next station where train stopped (packaged drinking water was not even thought of then). Filling water bottles at the next station was always exciting, first fighting the people queued at then lone working tap at the station while keeping eye on the train lest it should be moving , the mad sprint towards the train if the train did move or even if we imagined it to move. Another aspect was keeping track of which eatable was good at which station (specially vadapav’s) and eating them even if you were not hungry.
Bed time, the train we traveled was 3 tiered i.e it had 3 bunks in a row, the clamber for who will have the topmost bunk, being a good climber (or perhaps because i was the eldest) I often got the topmost bunk, some times it was 2 of us in same bunk. Sleep rarely came, I often ended up reading the comics / books I carried and drifted into sleep only to be awakened if the train didn’t move for long or bells at the station where train had halted.
But for me the most exciting part was the morning, I used to climb down and crouch by the window on the lowest bunk just to see the dawn of the rising sun, I loved to see fields whizz by, the villages pass by. The mornings started early for villages so often I’d see people driving their tractor waiting at a signal crossing en route, cows, goats grazing. The smell was wonderful, clean, different, villagish. The air gushing against your face as the train sped forward, the smell of coal from the engines and the passing tunnels, echoes of people shouting into tunnel, you simply cannot beat the experience of train travel, not even if you are flying business class.
originally published on:
http://raj-random-thoughts.blogspot.in/2011/04/cheap-air-travel-has-taken-romance-out.html
rajsachdev 