I love train stations and the trains themselves. I love the gong-bell signaling their arrival. Unlike a plane, I can follow a train easily–I can see and predict infallibly where it’s going on its tracks. I can even walk along the tracks to the destination…At least hypothetically.
Trains are terrestrial–they don’t vanish into the sky. They take people to places without airsickness. Terrorists tend not to blow them up and they can’t be hijacked to Cuba…All things fade and vanish, but when I hear the train bell in my little town at night, snow or rain, I’m reassured. From the other end of the universe, another life-form in another time dimension can look and set his watch by the train in my town at midnight, as the flakes gently fall. We all belong to a cosmos that has human trains running steadily.
Marc Songini 