The Tao of Travel

Ghosts, as old people seem to the young, have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness—traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating.—

GTES

No good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough.—

OPE

I had been in Latin America long enough to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendors of the continent.—

OPE

The great challenge in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal—show up and hop on.—

GTES

There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train, like the one from St. Erth to St. Ives. And there was never any question that I was on a branch-line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the branches of the trees that grew close to the tracks. Branch-line trains usually went through the woods. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows—the branches pushed at the glass like mops and brooms—what kind of train it was. You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.—

KBS

The nostalgia of railway buffs is dangerous, since they hanker for the past and are never happier than when they are able to turn an old train into a toy.—

KBS

The best story about Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third-class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, "Do you know who I am?" The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, "In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a third-class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?"—

DSS

A train isn't a vehicle. A train is part of the country. It's a place.—

RIR

The train offers the maximum of opportunity with the minimum of risk.—

GRB