Rail Travel Quotes

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude.

Rail is such an undignified way to travel. All that rapid racing about. Floating has so much more gravitas.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.

All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.

The journey has its own lyrics A duet of balanced motion The rails and wheels in tune

A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.

As they walked, the subtle lamplight of a dirigible washed over them. Finley glanced up, watching the light grow closer, slowly descending from the sky in a whirl of propellers as the ship made its way into the London air dock just a few miles away. How amazing it must be to float so high, to travel so quickly. Dandy followed her gaze, but they didn’t stop walking. “I was up in one of them flyers once,” he told her. “I climbed over the rail and hung on to one of the ropes. Freeing it was. I almost let go.” She whipped her head around to gape at him. “The fall would kill you.” He smiled ever so slightly. “Not afore I flew. Worse ways to go.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

It’s interesting, Ted,” I said, “that whenever something significantly painful happens to you, you rail against God, you rail against what a shitty, terrible world it is. But when something good happens to you, you guess you’re lucky. A minor tragedy and it’s God’s fault. A miraculous blessing and it’s a bit lucky. What do you make of that?

But there are things I approve of less.” “Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?” “No. Of your breaking his heart.

We all crave latitude in life, yet simultaneously dig ourselves deeper into domestic entrapment. We may dream of traveling light but accumulate as much as we can to keep us burdened and rooted to one spot. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because-though we all muse on the theme of escape-we stil find the notion of responsibility irresistible. The career, the house, the dependents, the debt-it grounds us. Provides us with a necessary security, a reason to get upin the morning. It narrows choice and ergo, gives us certainty. And though just about every man I know rails against being so cul-de-saced by domesic burden, we all embrace it. Embrace it with a vengeance.

In America the lack of investment in train travel speaks eloquently of a country always ready to appear righteous but pathologically averse to surrendering car and plane for a more eco-friendly, community-conscious form of mobility.

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it--but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any one of its innumerable islands. Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers. And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest. Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity? The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest." If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis­placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?" And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer. Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer­sault from one state into another. We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene­trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num­ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none­theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all. That's all there is to it! You are arrested! And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?" That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.

The trains roared in on iron rails, bringing people from places he had never seen, taking them away to places he had only heard about. To him, the railroad was a romance and an adventure, and now it would be his turn to travel off into the unknown.

suit. He was reading The Wall Street Journal. The lady across the table was probably Mrs. Dare, though all I could see of her were hot pink fingernails and the cover of Condé Nast Traveler. Why she’d be reading about vacations while she was on vacation, I wasn’t sure. Rachel stood at the porch railing and sighed. She wore Bermuda shorts and her Van Gogh T-shirt. (Yeah, Rachel was trying to teach me about art, but don’t get too impressed. I only remembered the dude’s name because he cut his ear off.)

The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn't matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed.

what motivated explorers? What inspired Magellan, battered by South America’s strange williwaw winds, to hold to his course through an unknown strait with no guarantee that it would lead to an untraversed sea? What makes adult and child alike feel so desperate at the prospect of abandoning their advance along shining rails, across shining seas, that lead beyond the boundaries of their familiar world? What inspires an explorer to undertake a voyage with no destination, to search with no objective, to travel with no itinerary other than the uncharted, the unfathomed, the unexpected?

They say that you need to ride the rails for a while to understand the traveling blues. They're wrong. To understand the traveling blues you need to be locked down somewhere. In a cell. Or in the army. Someplace where you're caged. Someplace where smokestack lightning looks like a faraway beacon of impossible freedom.

Now I get to travel to strange new worlds, seek out alien leaders and shoot them with my rail rifle.

Dictators don’t make the trains run on time, Rufus. They run down the rail networks because they travel in private planes.

What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backwards against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rails come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I had read about it, seen pictures in a book and decided that no matter when and how life would turn out, one day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train, and I practised saying the names: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, they were difficult to pronounce with all their hard consonants, but ever since the trip to Skagen, every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey.

Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Worries Forget your worries All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way The telegraph wires they hang from The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle them The world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic hand In the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger Flee And in the holes, The whirling wheels the mouths the voices And the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heels The demons are unleashed Iron rails Everything is off-key The broun-roun-roun of the wheels Shocks Bounces We are a storm under a deaf man's skull... 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?' Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away Overheated madness bellows in the locomotive Plague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our way We disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding clouds And drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpses Do like her, do your job 'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?

There is no pain - just travel. On her knees, she stays still as a supplicant ready for communion. It is very quiet. All of a sudden there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again. It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all -- if she can keep her sleepy eyes open. It's like a dream where she is. Like a dream where you find yourself underwater and you are panicked for a moment until you realize you no longer need to breathe, and you can stay under the surface forever. She feels her body falling sideways to the ground. It happens slow - and she expects a crash that never comes because her mind is jumping and it doesn't know which way is up anymore, like the moon above her and the fish below her and her in between floating, like on the surface of the river, floating between sea and sky, the world all skin, all meniscus, and she a part of it too. Moses Todd told her if you lean over the rail at Niagara Falls it takes your breath away, like turning yourself inside out -- and Lee the hunter told her that one time people used to stuff themselves in barrels and ride over the edge. And she is there too, floating out over the edge of the falls, the roar of the water so deafening it's like hearing nothing at all, like pillows in your ears, and the water exactly the temperature of your skin, like you are falling and the water is falling, and the water is just more of you, like everything is just more of you, just different configurations of the things that make you up. She is there, and she's sailing out and down over the falls, down and down, and it takes a long time because the falls are one of God's great mysteries and so high they are higher than any building, and so she is held there, spinning in the air, her eyes closed because she's spinning on the inside too, down and down. She wonders if she will ever hit the bottom, wonders will the splash ever come. Maybe not - because God is a slick god, and he knows things about infinities. Infinities are warm places that never end. And they aren't about good and evil, they're just peaceful-like and calm, and they're where all travelers go eventually, and they are round everywhere you look because you can't have any edges in infinities. And also they make forever seem like an okay thing.

And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of all— the sound of a green trolley car going around a comer— a trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire . . .

We want to sell ourselves the idea of travel as shown in airline commercials, the one in which each journey is filled with bright and vibrant stimuli and an almost mandatory sense of discovery: Travel is supposed to mean new foods, new sounds, and new friends. But much of the time, travel and the places we find ourselves as we travel are remarkably boring.

From then on he would make two or three trips a week to similar premises – bookstores, crystal shops, candle parlours, short-let niche operations selling a mix of pop-cultural memorabilia and truther merchandise from two or three generations ago – which had flourished along the abandoned high streets of the post-2007 austerity, run by a network of shabby voters hoping to take advantage of tumbling rents. Their real obsession lay in the idea of commerce as a kind of politics, expression of a fundamental theology. They had bought the rhetoric without having the talent or the backing. The internet was killing them. The speed of things was killing them. They were like old-fashioned commercial travellers, fading away in bars and single rooms, exchanging order books on windy corners as if it was still 1981 – denizens of futures that failed to take, whole worlds that never got past the economic turbulence and out into clear air, men and women in cheap business clothes washed up on rail platforms, weak-eyed with the brief energy of the defeated, exchanging obsolete tradecraft like Thatcherite spies.

Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.

With biting solemnity he spoke. “What are you holding on to as Mara? Why are you holding on to what does not exist and was once known? Why not let her be dusts to the winds of Teracia, insignificant in the eyes of what Atheists believe?” Teracia was home to the American Spiritualist headquarters and a very large expanse of forestry. Roma, to keep Mara’s last wishes had visited Teracia, against his Atheist believes, to spread her ashes so her soul may roam free. What soared through Roma was more sadness than anger in the moment. But the anger was enough to push him head first into Retina. “How dare you? You stupid son of a bitch…Ahh!” The force that took Roma forward took them over the compliant material that was the railing and they became subject to gravity. The impact resisting, antigravity flooring broke the majority of their fall. And as Roma traveled the approximately fifteen inches resistance flight back in the air, “I’ll kill you,” he told Retina. While Retina was silently thanking Dr. Hunter, a QueXtgen scientist who had just saved their lives without knowing it, for the scientific design of the house, “I’ll kill you…” Roma said as his body touched the floor, before losing consciousness.

Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salesclerks helped us find what we were looking for in stores, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It’s no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

There were some hours to spare before his ship sailed, and having deposited his luggage, including a locked leather despatch-case, on board, he lunched at the Cafe Tewfik near the quay. There was a garden in front of it with palm trees and trellises gaily clad in bougainvillias: a low wooden rail separated it from the street, and Morris had a table close to this. As he ate he watched the polychromatic pageant of Eastern life passing by: there were Egyptian officials in broad-cloth frock coats and red fezzes; barefooted splay-toed fellahin in blue gabardines; veiled women in white making stealthy eyes at passers-by; half-naked gutter-snipe, one with a sprig of scarlet hibiscus behind his ear; travellers from India with solar tepees and an air of aloof British Superiority; dishevelled sons of the Prophet in green turbans, a stately sheik in a white burnous; French painted ladies of a professional class with lace-rimmed parasols and provocative glances; a wild-eyed dervish in an accordion-pleated skirt, chewing betel-nut and slightly foaming at the mouth. A Greek boot-black with box adorned with brass plaques tapped his brushes on it to encourage customers, an Egyptian girl squatted in the gutter beside a gramophone, steamers passing into the Canal hooted on their syrens. ("Monkeys")

Like here it was that I entered that stage when a child overcomes naivite enough to realize an adult's emotional reaction as somethimes freakish for its inconsistencies, so can, on his own reasoning canvas, paint those early pale colors of judgement, resulting from initial moments of ability to critically examine life's perplexities, in tentative little brain-engine stirrings, before they faded to quickly join that train of remembered experience carrying signals indicating existence which itself far outweighs traction effort by thinking's soon slipping drivers to effectively resist any slack-action advantage, for starting so necessitates continual cuts on the hauler - performed as if governed lifelong by the tagwork of a student-green foreman who, crushed under on rushing time always building against his excessive load of emotional contents, is forever a lost ball in the high weeds of personal developments - until, with ever changing emphasis through a whole series of grades of consciousness (leading up from root-beginnings of obscure childish inconscious soul within a world), early lack - for what child sustains logic? - reaches a point of late fossilization, resultant of repeated wrong moves in endless switching of dark significances crammed inside the cranium, where, through such hindering habits, there no longer is the flexibility for thought transfer and unloading of dead freight that a standard gauge would afford and thus, as Faustian Destiny dictates, is an inept mink, limited, being in existence firmly tracked just above the constant "T" biased ballast supporting wherever space yearnings lead the worn rails of civilized comprehension, so henceforth is restricted to mere pickups and setouts of drab distortion, while traveling wearily along its familiar Western Thinking right-of-way. But choo-choo nonsense aside, ...

Whatever the final cost of HS2, all those tens of billions could clearly buy lots of things more generally useful to society than a quicker ride to Birmingham. Then there is all the destruction of the countryside. A high-speed rail line offers nothing in the way of charm. It is a motorway for trains. It would create a permanent very noisy, hyper-visible scar across a great deal of classic British countryside, and disrupt and make miserable the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout its years of construction. If the outcome were something truly marvellous, then perhaps that would be a justifiable price to pay, but a fast train to Birmingham is never going to be marvellous. The best it can ever be is a fast train to Birmingham. Remarkably, the new line doesn’t hook up to most of the places people might reasonably want to go to. Passengers from the north who need to get to Heathrow will have to change trains at Old Oak Common, with all their luggage, and travel the last twelve miles on another service. Getting to Gatwick will be even harder. If they want to catch a train to Europe, they will have to get off at Euston station and make their way half a mile along the Euston Road to St Pancras. It has actually been suggested that travelators could be installed for that journey. Can you imagine travelling half a mile on travelators? Somebody find me the person who came up with that notion. I’ll get the horsewhip. Now here’s my idea. Why not keep the journey times the same but make the trains so comfortable and relaxing that people won’t want the trip to end? Instead, they could pass the time staring out the window at all the gleaming hospitals, schools, playing fields and gorgeously maintained countryside that the billions of saved pounds had paid for. Alternatively, you could just put a steam locomotive in front of the train, make all the seats inside wooden and have it run entirely by volunteers. People would come from all over the country to ride on it. In either case, if any money was left over, perhaps a little of it could be used to fit trains with toilets that don’t flush directly on to the tracks, so that when I sit on a platform at a place like Cambridge or Oxford glumly eating a WH Smith sandwich I don’t have to watch blackbirds fighting over tattered fragments of human waste and toilet paper. It is, let’s face it, hard enough to eat a WH Smith sandwich as it is.

Coal smuts fly past and the train ploughs forwards, fire-bellied and smoke-spitting, a mystery of steam pressure and pistons, a miracle of gauges. The engine is a painted comet, its tail rattling behind with every class of passenger hanging on. Many undertake this mode of transportation with nervous trepidation, as well they might; it is well known that regular rail travel contributes to the premature ageing of passengers. Unnatural speed and the rapid travelling of distances have a baleful effect on the organs. Hurrying can prove fatal, notably when combined with suet-based meals, improving spirits and fine tobaccos. The worst offender: the new-built, gas-lit, steam-hauled carriages of Hades which will convey a passenger between Paddington and Farringdon under the very ground of the metropolis. According to reports miscellaneous, the passenger (smoke-blinded, nerve-rattled, near-suffocated) will emerge from the experience variously six months to five years older.

Like all men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and I will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite.

Turn it beautiful. His words came faintly at first, but they came again and again, always softly, always with the insistence of an elder commanding wisdom. Turn it all to beauty. She walked to the rail. When she turned and sat upon it, she heard a sailor in the crowd murmur that she might play them a tune. She hoped he was right. She needed the voices to be wrong. Fin raised the instrument to the cleft of her neck and closed her eyes. She emptied her mind and let herself be carried back to her earliest memory, the first pain she ever knew: the knowledge that her parents didn’t want her. The despair of rejection coursed through her. It fathered a knot of questions that bound her, enveloped her. Waves of uncertainty and frailty shook her to the bones. Her body quivered with anger and hopelessness. She reeled on the edge of a precipice. She wanted to scream or to throw her fists but she held it inside; she struggled to control it. She fought to subjugate her pain, but it grew. It welled up; it filled her mind. When she could hold it no more, exhausted by defiance and wearied by years of pretending not to care, Bartimaeus’s words surrounded her. Got to turn it beautiful. She dropped her defenses. She let weakness fill her. She accepted it. And the abyss yawned. She tottered over the edge and fell. The forces at war within her raced down her arms and set something extraordinary in motion; they became melody and harmony: rapturous, golden. Her fingers coaxed the long-silent fiddle to life. They danced across the strings without hesitation, molding beauty out of the miraculous combination of wood, vibration, and emotion. The music was so bright she felt she could see it. The poisonous voices were outsung. Notes raged out of her in a torrent. She had such music within her that her bones ached with it, the air around her trembled with it, her veins bled it. The men around fell still and silent. Some slipped to the deck and sat enraptured like children before a travelling bard.

China’s state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation is building a $14 billion rail project to connect Mombasa to the capital city of Nairobi. Analysts say the time taken for goods to travel between the two cities will be reduced from thirty-six hours to eight hours, with a corresponding cut of 60 per cent in transport costs. There are even plans to link Nairobi up to South Sudan, and across to Uganda and Rwanda. Kenya intends, with Chinese help, to be the economic powerhouse of the eastern seaboard.

راولپنڈی کا ریلوے اسٹیشن بھی شہر جیسا ٹھنڈا، بے نیاز اور جداگانہ ہے۔ یہ ۱۸۴۹ کی بات ہے۔ جب انگریز بہاد نے راول کے نگر پر قبضہ کیا اور اسے چھاؤنی کی شکل دی، ڈیڑھ صدی گزرنے کے باوجود، آج بھی اس علاقے کی بنیادی شناخت بہرحال فوج ہی ہے۔ ۱۸۸۱ میں جب ریل کی پٹڑی بچھ گئی تو مقامی گکھڑوں کی بھی سنی گئی۔ جس طرح ریلوے اسٹیشن کی عمارت کے ماتھے پر تین تکونوں کا تاج دھرا ہے، اسی طرح شہر بھی تین ثقافتوں کی ترشول پہ ٹنگا، تین آمروں کی یاد دلاتا ہے۔ پشاور کی سمت سے راولپنڈی میں داخل ہوں تو ملکی اور غیر ملکی بسوں کے اڈوں کے آگے ، ویسڑیج کا علاقہ شروع ہوتا ہے۔ شہر کا یہ پہلا حصہ، ایوب دور کی علامت ہے۔ پاک سر زمین کی پہلی آمریت کی مانند، اس کا تاثر بھی خاصا خوشگوار کن ہے۔ گھروں کے علاوہ یہاں دوکانیں ہیں یا پھر پرائیوٹ سکول۔ مرد مومن کے دور میں راولپنڈی کی آبادی نے سکیم تھری کے نام سے ایک نئی شہر پناہ اٹھتے دیکھی۔ حمید گُل سے اسلم بیگ تک فوجی اشرفیہ کی دوسری نسل اسی حصے میں قیام پذیر ہے۔ جہاں پچیس برس پہلے افغان جہاد کی مشاورت ہوتی تھی، وہاں اب بیوٹی پارلر اور بنک کثرت سے کھل گئے ہیں۔ جس طرح ہر شاہی قعلے کے ساتھ کچھ خرافات اور کچھ مراعات کا سلسلہ چلتا ہے، اسی طرح ویسڑیج کے ساتھ رینج روڈ اور سکیم تھری کے ساتھ ڈھوک چوہدریاں کی بستیاں آباد ہیں۔چکلالہ بیس سے پرے ویول لائن پار کریں تو اسلام آباد کی  حدود کا آغاز ہوتا ہے جو پاکستان سے دس کلو میڑ کے فاصلے پر واقع ہے۔ ریل کی سیٹی

His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed.

Buicks and fresh petticoats marked a clear cultural change. Victory over the world of scarcity was a historical accomplishment of the first order, but they also realised that the domain of plenty would bring new problems, of a nature and extent at which they could only guess. It’s a classic tale of generational change. The first generation struggles up out of poverty, the second generation acquires wealth, the third generation becomes spoilt and goes off the rails. Yet something else was going on here as well, something that concerned the very foundations of society. In a culture of survival, people have little choice, whereas now there were alternatives, more and more of them. Almost all the traditional norms and values, which had their roots in a ‘world of necessity’,

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board. That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns—and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren’t sure which and you don’t much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel.

اپنے اردگرد کے تمام شہروں سے دس کوس دور ہونے کے سبب، ڈسکہ کا پرانا نام "دس کوس" ہوا کرتا تھا۔ جو بگڑتے بگڑتے ڈسکہ ہو گیا۔ ویسے تو یہاں نندی پور کے نام کا آنند بھی ہے،مگر آزادی سے پہلے، ڈسکہ کی اصل شہرت، جگا ڈاکو تھا، جسے پنجاب کا رابن ہڈ بھی کہا جاتا ہے۔ لوک داستانوں میں ایسی بہادری کا حامل یہ کردار، برطانوی استعمار کے خلاف، مزاحمت کی علامت تھی۔ جگے کی زندگی بارہا فلم کے فیتے پر چڑھی مگر جس اختصار سے اس ٹپے میں یہ کہانی سنائی گئی ہے وہ بے مثال ہے۔ جگا جمیا فجر دی بانگے تے لوڈے ویلے کھیڈدا پھرے جگا جمیا تے ملن ودھایاں تے وڈا ہو کے ڈاکے ماردا جگے ماریا لائل پور ڈاکہ تے تاراں کھڑک گئیاں جگا وڈھیا بوڑھ دی چھاویں تے نو من ریت بھج گئی جگے کی پیدائش تو چونیاں کے ایک نواحی گاؤں میں ہوئی مگر ڈسکہ میں بڑے بڑے زمیندار آباد تھے، اس لئے جگے نے زیادہ تر وارداتیں یہیں کیں۔ تقسیم کے بعد اس کے اہل خانہ گڑھ مکتسر آباد ہو گئے جہاں اس کی بیٹی، اب بھی، اپنے باپ کی انتیس سال پر مشتمل کہانی سناتی ہے۔

Once I leave — once I start the car or catch the bus to the airport, by which the voyage is initiated — my brain starts to relax at the absence of my things, and thus the familiar thoughts that they inspire. And it is not just about the books and trinkets on my desk, because a real trip usually means leaving behind innumerable other forms of familiarity: the faces and the voices that we know well, and which cause their own cataracts of memories and associations through their long histories with us. There are the sounds we always hear, and the recognition of what caused them, like the scraping of the gate at the construction site across the square from my apartment, which arrives every morning at 7 a.m. There are the quotidian streets of daily life, lined with memories of events at each address. The shops and offices we visit most often; the foods we buy, with their familiar tastes as we eat them. But as we go away from these things, our own thoughts change, or grow into the space previously occupied by the familiar. The light itself becomes different once we start to travel, as we change setting, latitude, or geography. And with these changes, with the disappearance of the familiar and its many calls upon our thoughts, we finally begin to think differently, or even just begin to think at all.

He conjured a spotlight, which travelled down along the balcony, and rested on her face. ‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘All of the lights land in it.’ (All of the lights land in it: an excellent line. While I try to deny it, there were times – when I was younger – when this would have impressed me, too.) ‘Is this how you usually spend your Saturday nights?’ Mother asked. ‘No. Sometimes. I like the technology, you see. And I like to help out.’ Mother leaned against the railing alongside him. She let her hair fall against his arm. ‘I’ve never had company before,’ Father said, and smiled. ‘This makes things much more interesting.’ ‘I’m not that interesting at all,’ Mother said. ‘I mean, I’m pretty boring. Actually.’ ‘I don’t believe you. What’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you?’ ‘What?’ ‘Tell me the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Nobody’s boring when they tell you the best thing that’s ever happened. Go.’ Mother thought of her princess dress, and the faces of the villagers watching the Harvest Festival. In her mind, they multiplied, so that she led the parade through a crowd of hundreds – thousands – of well-wishers. ‘Fine,’ she said. She knew exactly how she would tell it. ‘See,’ Father said, at the end. ‘That wasn’t boring. But it wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to you, either.’ ‘It wasn’t?’ ‘Of course not,’ Father said. He concentrated on the fuse box, passing it from one great palm to the other. He was smiling, close to laughter. ‘That’s tonight.

How to Apologize Ellen Bass Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeleton you will need skill to expose, maybe the flying silver carp that's invaded the Great Lakes, tumbling the others into oblivion. If you don't live near a lake, you'll have to travel. Walking is best and shows you mean it, but you could take a train and let yourself be soothed by the rocking on the rails. It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human. When my mother was in the hospital, my daughter and I had to clear out the home she wouldn't return to. Then she recovered and asked, incredulous, How could you have thrown out all my shoes? So you'll need a boat. You could rent or buy, but, for the sake of repairing the world, build your own. Thin strips of Western red cedar are perfect, but don't cut a tree. There'll be a demolished barn or downed trunk if you venture further. And someone will have a mill. And someone will loan you tools. The perfume of sawdust and the curls that fall from your plane will sweeten the hours. Each night we dream thirty-six billion dreams. In one night we could dream back everything lost. So grill the pale flesh. Unharness yourself from your weary stories. Then carry the oily, succulent fish to the one you hurt. There is much to fear as a creature caught in time, but this is safe. You need no defense. This is just another way to know you are alive. “How to Apologize” originally appeared in The New Yorker (March 15, 2021).

I work as fast as I can. Binah will come soon looking for me. It’s Mother, however, who descends the back steps into the yard. Binah and the other house slaves are clumped behind her, moving with cautious, synchronized steps as if they’re a single creature, a centipede crossing an unprotected space. I sense the shadow that hovers over them in the air, some devouring dread, and I crawl back into the green-black gloom of the tree. The slaves stare at Mother’s back, which is straight and without give. She turns and admonishes them. “You are lagging. Quickly now, let us be done with this.” As she speaks, an older slave, Rosetta, is dragged from the cow house, dragged by a man, a yard slave. She fights, clawing at his face. Mother watches, impassive. He ties Rosetta’s hands to the corner column of the kitchen house porch. She looks over her shoulder and begs. Missus, please. Missus. Missus. Please. She begs even as the man lashes her with his whip. Her dress is cotton, a pale yellow color. I stare transfixed as the back of it sprouts blood, blooms of red that open like petals. I cannot reconcile the savagery of the blows with the mellifluous way she keens or the beauty of the roses coiling along the trellis of her spine. Someone counts the lashes—is it Mother? Six, seven. The scourging continues, but Rosetta stops wailing and sinks against the porch rail. Nine, ten. My eyes look away. They follow a black ant traveling the far reaches beneath the tree—the mountainous roots and forested mosses, the endless perils—and in my head I say the words I fashioned earlier. Boy Run. Girl Jump. Sarah Go. Thirteen. Fourteen . . . I bolt from the shadows, past the man who now coils his whip, job well done, past Rosetta hanging by her hands in a heap. As I bound up the back steps into the house, Mother calls to me, and Binah reaches to scoop me up, but I escape them, thrashing along the main passage, out the front door, where I break blindly for the wharves. I don’t remember the rest with clarity, only that I find myself wandering across the gangplank of a sailing vessel, sobbing, stumbling over a turban of rope. A kind man with a beard and a dark cap asks what I want. I plead with him, Sarah Go. Binah chases me, though I’m unaware of her until she pulls me into her arms and coos, “Poor Miss Sarah, poor Miss Sarah.” Like a decree, a proclamation, a prophecy. When I arrive home, I am a muss of snot, tears, yard dirt, and harbor filth. Mother holds me against her, rears back and gives me an incensed shake, then clasps me again. “You must promise never to run away again. Promise me.” I want to. I try to. The words are on my tongue—the rounded lumps of them, shining like the marbles beneath the tree. “Sarah!” she demands. Nothing comes. Not a sound. I remained mute for a week. My words seemed sucked into the cleft between my collar bones. I rescued them by degrees, by praying, bullying and wooing. I came to speak again, but with an odd and mercurial form of stammer. I’d never been a fluid speaker, even my first spoken words had possessed a certain belligerent quality, but now there were ugly, halting gaps between my sentences, endless seconds when the words cowered against my lips and people averted their eyes. Eventually, these horrid pauses began to come and go according to their own mysterious whims. They might plague me for weeks and then remain away months, only to return again as abruptly as they left.

ریل کہانی دینہ سے آگے بڑھے تو کلوال، کالا گوجراں سے ہوتے ہوئے جہلم جا کر رکتی ہے۔ دینہ کے بعد ایک ویرانہ ہے جسے محکمہ مال کی قانونگوئی ، بوڑھے جنگل کے نام سے جانتی ہے۔ یہیں سے ایک راستہ، روہتاس کا سراغ لے کر نکلتا ہے۔ ایک بوسیدہ پل پر کاہان کا دریا عبور کریں تو سامنے روہتاس ہے۔ روہتاس کے طلسم سے بچ نکلنے میں کامیاب ہو جائیں تو بھی جہلم میں داخل ہونا آسان نہیں۔ شہر اور چھاونی سے آنکھ بچا کر ایک راستہ رڑیالہ اور داراپور کو جاتا ہے۔ ٹلہ جوگیاں اسی راستے پر واقع ہے۔ روہتاس اور ٹلہ جوگیاں کے بعد، جہلم مسافر کے لئے اپنے بازو کھول دیتا ہے۔ آہستہ آہستہ، دو آبے کا حسن دیکھنے والوں کو اپنی گرفت میں لے لیتا ہے۔ بڑھاپے کی محبت کی طرح، پر تجسس مگر شکستگی پر آمادہ۔ جہلم کتنا پرانا ہے، کچھ یقین سے نہیں کہا جا سکتا، البتہ اتنا پرانا ضرور ہے کہ اس کو چھوڑ کے جانے والے، اب بھی اس کے سحر میں گرفتار ہیں۔ شہر اور دریا کی تاریخ ایک دوسرے سے آنول اور بچے کی مانند جڑی ہے۔ اس سے پہلے کے شہر اپنا افسوں پڑھ کر پھونکے، دریا اس کا طلسم ختم کر دیتا ہے۔ دریائے سندہ تو خیر اپنے ماننے والوں کے لئے مقدس ہے ہی، جہلم کے پانی بھی کئی پرانوں کی جڑیں سیراب کرتے ہیں۔ ویتھ دریا، وتستا، ہائیڈس پس! اس کے چند نام ہیں۔ رگ وید کے مطابق یہ دریا، پورے ہندوستان کو پاکیزگی بخشتے ہیں۔ آج کل، بہرحال، اس کے پانی روح روشن کرنے سے زیادہ گھر روشن کرنے کے کام آتے ہیں۔ اننت ناگ سے پچاس میل دور، ویری نگ کا چشمہ ہے، جہاں سے دریائے جہلم اپنا سر اُٹھاتا ہے۔ کسی زمانے میں اس کی شکل گول کنڈکے جیسی تھی مگر مغلیہ دور میں جہانگیر نے اس جگہ ہشت پہلو تا لاب بنوا کر چشمے کو دو رویہ درختوں سے آراستہ کیا۔ پیر پنجال کے پہاڑی سلسلے سے نکل کر دریا، اننت ناگ، برج بہارہ، اونتی پورہ، سوپورہ اور بارہ مولا سے ہوتا ہوا، میلوں کا سفر طے کر کے مظفرآباد کے راستے پاکستان پہنچتا ہے۔ راستے میں بڑے بڑے آبی ذخیرے اور چھوٹے چھوٹے جذباتی جزیرے بھی آتے ہیں۔ یہیں ایشیا کی سب سے بڑی جھیل وولرہے ۔ ریل کی سیٹی

Hey." Her host grabbed her by the back of the jacket and hauled her upright. "I'm not fishing you out again if you fall overboard." Their eyes met. He wasn't kidding. "Not exactly a people person, are you?" she said. He grimaced and released her. Tally turned back to the rail, oddly disconcerted by his touch, even through the jacket. She didn't lean as far out this time, but she strained to see in the growing darkness. Tally suspected Arnaud's boat was probably Trevor Church's boat, and if that was the case, her father was not only going to be absolutely livid about the loss of property, he was also going to blow his stack if she didn't at least make an attempt to find Bouchard. Damn it. "I'll pay you to help me find him," Tally said briskly, turning to face him. An eyebrow rose. "Yeah? How much?" "A thousand dollars." He didn't so much as blink at the offer. "Are you for real? Okay, two thousand." "Only two? He couldn't've been very important to you." She considered Bouchard a slimy turd, a necessary evil. On the other hand, the pirate wasn't going to risk his life and boat if he knew she felt that way. "Five? Ten? Twenty thousand? How much will it take?" "How much you got on you?" She held her arms out. "Not a whole hell of a lot. But I have traveler's checks back at-I'll buy your boat from you." She narrowed her eyes when he didn't answer. This was nuts. She was standing out here in the middle of a typhoon negotiating with a pirate to save the life of a man she'd just as soon drown herself. "You rat. Okay. I'll pay you to captain it. And I'll pay you to help me find Arnaud." He folded his arms across his massive, hairy chest. "Hmmm." "Is that a yes?" He paused for so long, she thought he'd gone into a coma with his eyes-eye-open.

Top Dog" If I could, I would take your grief, dig it up out of the horseradish field and grate it into something red and hot to sauce the shellfish. I would take the lock of hair you put in the locket and carry it in my hand, I would make the light strike everything the way it hit the Bay Bridge, turning the ironwork at sunset into waffles. If I could, I would blow your socks off, they would travel far, always in unison, past the dead men running, past the cranes standing in snow, beyond the roads we rode, so small in our little car, it was like riding in a miner's helmet. If I could I would make everyone vote and call their public servants to say, “No one was meant for this.” I would go back to the afternoon we made love in the tall grass under the full sun not far from the ravine where the old owner had flung hundreds of mink cages. I would memorize gateways to the afterworld, the electric third rail, the blond braid our girl has hanging down her back, the black guppy we killed at our friends’ when we unplugged the bubbler and the fish floated to the top, one eye up at the ceiling, the other at the blue gravel on the bottom of the tank. I would beg an audience with Sister Lucia, the last living of the children visited by Our Lady of Fatima, I would ask her about the weight of secrets, if they let her sleep or if she woke at night with a body on her body, if the body said, “Let's play top dog, first I'll lie on you, then you lie on me.” I would ask how she lived with revelation, the normal state of affairs amplified beyond God, bumped up to the Virgin Mother, who no doubt knew a few things, passed them on, quietly, and I would ask Lucia how she lived with knowing, how she could keep it under her hat, under wraps, button up, zip her lip, play it close to the vest, never telling, never using truth as a weapon.

The Man-Moth Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Declan had been told a long time ago that he had to know what he wanted, or he'd never get it. Not by his father, because his father would never have delivered such pragmatic advice in such a pragmatic way. No, even if Niall Lynch believed in the sentiment, he would have wrapped it up in a long story filled with metaphor and magic and nonsense riddles. Only years after the storytelling would Declan be sitting somewhere and realize that all along Niall had been trying to teach him to balance his checkbook, or whatever the tale had really been about. Niall could never just say the thing. No, this piece of advice--You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it--was given to Declan by a senator from Nevada he'd met during a DC field trip back in eighth grade. The other children had been bored by the pale stone restraint of the city and the sameness of the law and government offices they toured. Declan, however, had been fascinated. He'd asked the senator what advice he had for those looking to get into politics. "Come from money," the senator had said first, and then when all the eighth graders and their teachers had stared without laughing, he added, "You have to know what you want, or you'll never get it. Make goals." Declan made goals. The goal was DC. The goal was politics. The goal was structure, and more structure, and yet more structure. He took AP classes on political science and policy. When he traveled with his father to black markets, he wrote papers. When he took calls from gangsters and shady antique auction houses, he arranged drop-offs near DC and wrangled meetings with HR people. Aglionby Academy made calls and pulled strings; he got names, numbers, internships. All was going according to plan. His father's will conveniently left him a townhouse adjacent to DC. Declan pressed on. He kept his brothers alive; he graduated; he moved to DC. He made the goal, he went towards the goal. When he took his first lunch meeting with his new boss, he found himself filled with the same anticipation he'd had as an eighth grader. This was the place, he thought, where things happened. Just across the road was the Mexican embassy. Behind him was the IMF. GW Law School was a block away. The White House, the USPS, the Red Cross, all within a stone's throw. This was before he understood there was no making it for him. He came from money, yeah, but the wrong kind of money. Niall Lynch's clout was not relevant in this daylight world; he only had status in the night. And one could not rise above that while remaining invisible to protect one's dangerous brother. On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them. He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes. Before that, he hadn't understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing. This was where he'd found art.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

Hope springs eternal—a truism for jilted lovers and for the children of dying parents. We convince ourselves the inevitable isn’t, and when it is upon us, we rail and plead. Or deny. Busy with preparation and travel, I had pushed away my worry; now that I was here, at midmorning in Taipei, when less than a day before I’d been in the chilly Bay Area, my new reality struck me.

Slightly further afield, you will find Baroque palaces such as Nymphenberg and Schlossheim, with wonderful parks and art galleries. On a slightly darker note, Dachau Concentration Camp is around 10 miles from town. Trains go there from Munich’s main train station every ten minutes and the journey takes less than 15 minutes. Transport in Munich is well organised with a network of trains – S‐Bahn is the suburban rail; U‐Bahn is underground and there are trams and buses. The S‐Bahn connects Munich Airport with the city at frequent intervals depending on the time of day or night. Munich is especially busy during Oktoberfest, a beer festival that began in the 19th century to celebrate a royal wedding, and also in the Christmas market season, which runs from late November to Christmas Eve. Expect wooden toys and ornaments, cakes and Gluwien. The hot mulled wine stands require a deposit for each mug. This means that locals stand chatting at the stalls while drinking. As a result, the solo traveller is never alone. The downside of Munich is that it is a commercial city, one that works hard and sometimes has little patience for tourists. Natives of Munich also have a reputation for being a little snobbish and very brand conscious. To read: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Narrated by death himself, this novel tells of a little girl sent to a foster family in 1939. She reads The Grave Diggers Handbook each evening with her foster father and, as her love of reading grows, she steals a book from a Nazi book burning. From this, her renegade life begins.

Josie said. “We almost gave up several times,” Dora admitted, shaking her head.  “But maybe the quilt did keep us from going home earlier than we had planned.” “I like the name Rolling Stones,” Josie commented. “Hey, that’s kind of like us. We didn’t use wagons, but we managed to tour part of the country.” “You’re right. I believe we should just keep the quilt.” “Won’t it remind us of all the anxious moments?” “Maybe, but we showed courage and persevered,” Dora said, soundly.  “Hey, where’s the bonus they promised us?” “Well, I don’t know.” Dora searched the box and held up a blue envelope. “Let’s see.” Josie whipped it out of her hand. She broke the seal and took out two airplane tickets. “Airplane tickets?” Dora asked in disbelief. “What do we do with tickets?” “Here’s a note between the tickets.” Josie opened it.  “It says the tickets are for a quilt show in Philadelphia. Milton wants us to attend.  He says he will meet us there and answer more questions for us.” “But we’re afraid to fly,” Dora protested. “Could we send the tickets back?” Josie suggested. “I don’t think so. Milton will be out his money.” “When is it?” Dora took the tickets and examined them. “In September. Only a month away.” Josie tapped her chin in thought. “If we decided to do more touring, we could extend our trip from there to the New England States.” “We could see the autumn leaves,” Dora said, excitement rising in her voice. “Anthony wanted us to visit him in Iowa,” Josie reminded Dora. “How are we going to work all this in?” “I have no idea. Why does traveling have to be so complicated and so full of surprises?”   ______   MDora looped a bright red scarf around her neck while glancing out her bedroom  window. The wind swirled bits of trash down the sidewalk of their Hedge City, Nebraska, home. She sighed, wishing she could stay at home today and read.  Buzzie looked up at her and meowed, expressing the same sentiments. She reached down and patted her softly.  But she didn’t have that luxury today. She had agreed to substitute teach for the current English teacher who would be out for at least a week.  Josie called from the kitchen. “Want more coffee?” “Yes, please.  Fill my mug.  I’ll drink it on my way to school.” She reached into the closet and pulled out a beige sweater. A glance in the mirror confirmed the bright red scarf did wonders for the nondescript sweater’s color. Josie joined her at the door dressed in russet slacks and matching jacket and handed Dora her mug.  “A little blustery today.” “For sure.” Dora eyed Josie, wishing she had the sense of style Josie displayed. The sisters would walk together and then would split to their separate ways, Josie to fill in at the

It was a glorious experience for the children to travel by rail and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the rear of the last car of the Blue Train, were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be, as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York City to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town or Kaapstad in Afrikaans, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.

During World War II trolley tracks ran down Central Avenue, the main street of the Jersey City Heights, before traveling off of the cliffs and continuing down to Hoboken on a high wooden trestle. At best, it was a hairy ride as it jostled around, nearly coming off of the rails. For some of us kids, it was exciting to hop onto the back of the trolley for a free ride, and then snap the cord to the electrical rod, which provided power from an overhead wire, when I wanted to get off. This would leave the conductor spewing a streak of profanity, as his trolley ground to a standstill. Departing the scene in haste, I would run and quickly disappear into the darkness, leaving him with the daunting task of getting the rod back onto the overhead wire in the dark.

Even at a distance he recognized the way she sat a horse, the tilt of her head. He couldn’t believe she had come so far and so quickly. Fate had indeed led her in a circle back to him. Ordering Blackbird back to his mother’s lodge, Hunter increased his pace, the dread of leaving his people forgotten. Destiny. A month ago he had railed against it. Now he wasn’t certain how he felt. Resentful, yet pleased. And relieved. Deep in the quiet places of his heart, he sensed the rightness. Fate. Today it had brought him a woman, a woman like no other, with skin as white as a night moon, hair like honey, and eyes like the summer sky. His woman, and this time she came freely. From the hilltop Loretta watched the lone man walking toward her from the village. Relief flooded through her when she recognized Hunter’s loose-hipped, graceful stride. She crossed herself quickly and murmured thanks to the Holy Mother for her intercession. A dozen emotions surging through her, she urged Friend down the embankment. Hunter met her halfway across the flat. As Loretta rode toward him, she couldn’t stop staring. Even though she had been away from him only a short while, she had forgotten how Indian he looked. How savage. He moved with the fluid strength of a well-muscled animal, his shoulders, arms, and chest in constant motion, a bronzed play of tendon and flesh. The wind whipped his hair about his face. Mercy. He wasn’t wearing any breeches, just a breechcloth and knee-high moccasins. She drew Friend to a halt and swallowed a rush of anxiety. Aunt Rachel was right. He was a Comanche, first, last, and always. Yet she had come to him. “Blue Eyes?” He slowed his pace as he got closer, his indigo eyes traveling the length of her, taking in every detail of her dress, from the high neckline down to the bit of petticoat and black high-topped shoes showing below the hem of her full skirts. His eyes warmed with the familiar gleam of laughter that had once irritated her so much. She fastened her gaze on his face and, resisting the need to blurt out her troubles, searched her mind for the appropriate Comanche greeting, determined to begin this encounter on the right note. “Hi, hites,” she said, lifting her right hand. He caught the stallion’s bridle and stepped close. He was so tall that he didn’t have to tip his head back to see her face. With a smile in his voice, he replied, “Hello.” Loretta caught her bottom lip between her teeth to stop its trembling. How like him to remember her word of greeting. He was her friend. She had been right to come here.

It was a glorious experience to travel by rail for the children and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the back of the last car were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, was that it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.” When the train finally came to a halt, after being switched from one track to another through the extensive rail yards, the realization sank in that this was their new life. Kaapstad, Cape Town in Afrikaans, would be their new home and German, the language they had spoken until now, was history. A new family came to meet them and helped carry their luggage to waiting cars. All of these strange people speaking strange languages were uncles, aunts and nephews. An attractive elderly woman who spoke a language very similar to German, but definitely not the same, was the children’s new Ouma. However, to avoid confusion she was to be addressed as Granny. She lived in a Dutch gabled house called “Kismet” located in a beautiful suburb known as “Rosebank.” This would be their home until Adeline could find a place where they could settle in and start their new life.

Righteousnessis like the train that travels on the track. If not for the rails, the train wouldn’t have anything to run on.

God's journey for us is like that of a train. While we ride upon its mode of transport, we move from one box car to the next, phases or seasons of our life. We feel as if the train is our journey but the real path is actually the rails upon which the train travels; the heart of where God's direction for us exists. Each car of the train is just a small part of the greater whole to which we, in our finite understanding, is incomprehensible.

God's journey for us is like that of a train. While we ride upon its mode of transport, we move from one box car to the next, phases or seasons of our life. We feel as if the train is our journey but the real path is actually the rails upon which the train travels; the heart of where God's direction for us exists. Each car of the train is just a small part of the greater whole to which we, in our finite understanding, find incomprehensible.

sinew that holds him together. Our lips press and mold, mingling, taking, begging . . . Desperate. Beck’s tongue runs against my bottom lip, eliciting a moan from deep within me, lighting a fire so hot, so wild, my hands start to travel up his neck to his cheeks where I grip him, positioning his head so when I open my mouth, I can expertly dive my tongue onto his. He groans, his lap shifting against mine now, his hard-on pressing against my wet and throbbing center. I match his rocking, using my position on his lap to take advantage of his length I can feel through his board shorts. This is exactly what I didn’t want to happen, but God, am I happy it has. Maybe I really should live in the moment, maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity, maybe I should… “Woo, yeah, get it on!” Zoey screams from below us, immediately shooting me off Beck’s lap and into the rail behind me, causing me to lose my balance. With cat-like reflexes, Beck catches my arm and steadies me, his eyes aware but heady with lust, his breathing as erratic as mine. “Don’t let us disturb you,” Zoey calls out once again. “Just taking a midnight stroll.” “Yup, that’s great.” I give her a thumbs up with one hand as the other is holding on to Beck, our eyes never breaking contact. “Have a good night, you

So much depended upon the daft schedule of Trenitalia and the unions so imbued with whimsy and given to strikes. In theory, Trenitalia, the national corporation responsible for rail travel in Italy, is organized, codified, simple, and comprehensible. In actual lived experience, however, Trenitalia is chaotic, disordered, complex, and arcane. I’m sure there are some who understand the great mysterious force that is Trenitalia; the fascist conduttori, for one, and the persons who wrote Trenitalia’s adulatory Wikipedia entry, for another. To my thinking, the logic of Trenitalia was the worst kind of Italian disregard for rules. Even the Trenitalia website appears to have been created by workers who have a slender understanding of how humans think. It reads like it was written in Cyborg, fed through Google Translate into Italian, and slapped on to a webpage. More than one time, I’ve sat in the wrong Trenitalia car, taken the wrong train, or bought an online ticket for a trip other than the one I’d intended to take. And all this even before the trains mysteriously stop running because of a sciopero bianco, a work-to-rule strike, otherwise known as an “Italian strike,” when workers register protest by doing no more work than is mandated by their employment contracts. A butterfly flaps its wings in Chioggia, and a train running to Siena freezes on its tracks, such is the indescribable strangeness of Trenitalia. It’s a fascist adage: “Say what you like about Mussolini, but at least the trains run on time.” This was true neither in Mussolini’s day nor today. Trains exist and there are many, which makes Italy already superior to the car-logged, rail-beleaguered United States, but don’t set your watch by them. However predictable, Trenitalia’s inconstancy is an issue when you’re planning a perfectly orchestrated murder from 4,000 miles away. I raise the bureaucratic specter of Trenitalia because much of the success of Marco’s murder rested upon it. The remainder hinged on my skill with knives.

For weeks I had studied maps, large-scale and small, but maps are not reality at all--they can be tyrants. I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

Train switches are not just on the train tracks, they are in your life too, they are on every inch of the roads you travel! Just decide to use the switches on your rails and your path will change immediately!

... I will travel south by rail across a high range of mountains, watching the narrow, somber valleys, rough and ragged, open out on either side of me, and I will see mountain streams rise among the rocks, crashing down in waves to the foothills, plunging under bridges as our train rushes over -- and a chilly wind will howl from the darkness, and all of us who are passengers will shiver, and we will cling to each other, living by each other's breaths, but then dawn will vanquish the darkness ...

When finally Lawrence and the others reached the culvert, they found one Turkish soldier dead and Farraj horribly wounded, shot through the side. With efforts to stanch his bleeding to no avail, Farraj’s companions attempted to lift him onto a camel, even as the young man begged to be left to die. The matter was rather decided when an alarm went up that a Turkish patrol of some fifty soldiers was approaching along the rails. Knowing the hideous end the Turks often perpetrated on enemy captives, Lawrence and his bodyguards had a tacit understanding to finish off any of their number too badly wounded to travel. With Farraj, this coup de grâce task fell to Lawrence. “I knelt down beside him, holding my pistol near the ground by his head so that he should not see my purpose, but he must have guessed it, for he opened his eyes and clutched me with his harsh, scaly hand, the tiny hand of these unripe Nejd fellows. I waited a moment, and he said, ‘Daud will be angry with you,’ the old smile coming back so strangely to this gray shrinking face. I replied, ‘salute him from me.’ He returned the formal answer, ‘God will give you peace,’ and at last wearily closed his eyes.” After shooting Farraj, Lawrence remounted his camel, and he and his entourage fled as the first Turkish bullets came for them.

X Today set sail like a cruising ship taking us with it, so we waved goodbye to the selves that we were yesterday and left them ashore like a memory while we launched out on the open sea, were travelling! The breeze grew stiff so we grabbed the railings,tasted the surf as the sky came toward us, the equator noon a place to pass us, while the tropics of tea swung over us and straight on by as time kept sailing and we hung on, admiring the vistas of being away while the shadows died down from the flames of day and we coasted around a long headland of sky and into night's port while, out in the bay tomorrow called out like a ringing buoy.

March 17, 1916. When I travel by rail between assignments, I usually go in the rearmost car; here it is called “caboose,” a word with maritime origins, meaning originally a ship’s galley. The caboose car is red in color and is where the conductor sits, also where he keeps his tools, lanterns, and flares. He can observe the whole train from a small tower that sticks up from the roof of the car. I chat with the conductor

People who travel for work usually jump on trains, climb into planes, and check into hotels so that they can do their regular work somewhere other than where they were in the first place. But when you are a travel writer, it is simply your work to go somewhere, and going there is the only way you can do that job, which recursively covers the hows and whys of going there. When you are a travel writer, the journey itself is much — if not most — of what you do.

Only persevering with rail travel due to bus timetables resembling something on of the harder codes assigned to Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

For decades, Amtrak ran a long-distance train from Los Angeles to Jacksonville called the Sunset Limited. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina washed out the tracks from New Orleans to Florida. The service was never restored, and the Gulf Coast has been without rail travel for nearly a decade now.

I was suddenly afraid she was going to climb the rail and leap into the sea. But maybe she wasn't. Maybe it was a delusion, my delusion. Maybe it was the fever coming on. Maybe what I really experienced on the steamer was the frightening, awe-inspiring sense we had been cut loose, were beyond the sight of land, lost. After all, what sort of woman, clutching the hand of her little boy, would actually consider climbing a ship's rail and leaping out into the Irish Sea? What sort of woman would consider stepping off a London bus into crowds, into oblivion? Only a woman penniless in wartime. Only a woman traveling into exile. Only a woman who suspects, from redness around his eyes and a croak in his voice, that her son has a life-threatening bout of scarlet fever coming on. Only a woman whose husband is a prisoner, whose father is a tyrant. Only a woman exhausted by life.

A walking man will kick the grass down in the direction of travel, but a horse with the swinging movements of its hoofs will knock the grass down so it points in the direction from which it has come.

Now, standing at the railing as the town came into clearer view, she began to understand the point of travel;

Ravi sat on his cot, leaning on a stack of pillows, and looked out of the window. The sun was setting. The grazing herd of clouds was gone. Soon it was dark, and the fantasy returned, the fantasy of the journey. The seedling house became a compartment in a train, and he the lone and imprisoned traveller. Dark wastes lay on either side; from them fleeting signs spoke to Ravi—a solitary firefly, a plodding lantern. The wheels moved along the track with soft, deceptive thuds. Then he heard the far rush of another track racing towards his own, the sorrow of another, futilely seeking comfort. The rails met for one moment, tumultuously, to part again. To race away into the many-mysteried night.

Indian Railways is the fourth largest rail network in the world These are the top 5 most luxurious trains which have the best beautiful views from the window of your seat and serve the best hospitality. These trains pass through beautiful places. Surely your experience will be at the next level. Maharajas' Express : It runs between October and April, covering around 12 destinations most of which lie in Rajasthan. Palace on Wheels: The train starts its journey from New Delhi and covers Jaipur, Sawai Madhopur, Chittorgarh, Udaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bharatpur, and Agra, before returning to Delhi. If you plan on experiencing this royal journey, make sure you have Rs. 3,63,300 to spend! The Golden Chariot : you can take a ride along the Southern State of Karnataka and explore while living like a VIP on wheels. You start from Bengaluru and then go on to visit famous tourist attractions like Hampi, Goa and Mysore to name a few. The Golden Chariot also boasts of a spa, a gym and restaurants too. The Deccan Odyssey: The Deccan Odyssey can give you tours across destinations in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Gujarat. It starts from Mumbai, covers 10 popular tourist locations including Ratnagiri, Sindhudurg, Goa, Aurangabad, Ajanta-Ellora Nasik, Pune, returning to Mumbai. Maha Parinirvan Express / Buddha Circuit Train: The Buddha Express travels through parts of Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, where Buddism originated over 2,500 years ago. This isn’t as opulent as the other luxury Indian trains and instead drops passengers off at hotels at famous tourist destinations such as Bodhgaya, Rajgir and Nalanda.

I like trains and the romance of traveling by train. When you travel by train, you can’t go wherever you want to go; you have to stay on the train tracks (aka rails) and follow where they run. When you don’t have a choice of things to do or places to go, the decision to monotask is much easier. Therefore, I like to remind myself to Sleep on rails. Riding the rails (in the comfort of my own bed of course) from one point to another keeps me focused on sleep and prevents me from taking any side trips during the night.

Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.

She saw the birth unfolding, saw the small creature with those strangely wise eyes that seemed to belong to every newborn. And then the years rushing on, the child growing, faces taking the shape they would carry into old age. But not all. As mother after mother stepped through her, futures flashed bright, and some died quickly indeed. Fraught, flickering sparks, ebbing, winking out, darkness rushing in. And at these she cried out, filled with anguish even as she understood that souls travelled countless journeys, of which only one could be known by a mortal, so many, in countless perturbations, and that the loss belonged only to others, never to the child itself, for in its inarticulate, ineffable wisdom, understanding was absolute; the passage of life that seemed tragically short could well be the perfect duration, the experience complete. Others, however, died in violence, and this was a crime, an outrage against life itself. Here, among these souls, there was fury, shock, denial. There was railing, struggling, bitter defiance.

My second law of long-distance train travel is to get up early enough to use the shower before anyone else does, so you encounter it while it’s pristine. (The first is never to buy coffee at a train station.)

How did you come to live in Amsterdam?” I ask her. “Did you study there?” She twists a strand of hair around her fingers, staring out over the rail and across the water. “No, I studied medicine in Algiers, then earned my doctoral degree in Italy. Then spent several years as a ship’s surgeon because I couldn’t find professional work on the continent.” She squints, counting the years backward in her head. “Then I was hired to assist at the Hortus Medicus—the botanical garden in Amsterdam that cultivates medicinal plants from around the world. They’re funded by the university, and most of the physicians do at least some of their training there. I started teaching as a substitute when the male professors were traveling or unwell, and eventually they gave me my own classes and let me do my own research.” “Do you speak Dutch?” I ask. She nods. “And Italian. And Arabic, and some of the Berber dialects, though not fluently.” “And you’re a doctor,” I say, trying to make it a statement rather than a question though the concept still seems outlandish, not because women don’t have the capacity for medical professions, but because I’ve simply never heard of any reaching such a recognized level of achievement. “A real doctor.” She gives me a half smile. “Improbable as it may seem, I am.” “Felicity Primrose Montague!” I exclaim. Monty throws back his head and laughs. Felicity rolls her eyes. “Oh good, now there are two of you.” “You’re incredible,” I say to her. She looks down at her hands, color rising in her cheeks. “That’s very kind, thank you.” “You are!” I say. “You’re a doctor! And a professor! At a university!” “It really is bloody impressive, Fel,” Monty adds. “And a pirate!” I say. “You’re like an adventure-novel heroine! I wish I could introduce you to my fiancée. She’d go mad over you.” “Is she interested in medicine or piracy?” Felicity asks. “Neither in particular,” I say. “But she’s very interested in women who cast off societal expectations and work for change despite the men who endeavor to stand in their way.

The bartender/cook looked as if he might have been a fixture of the desert even before the rails were laid. He had the worn look of a man who had seen more than he should and heard a thousand stories that remained in his head, classified and indexed as drama, humor, or horror. There was also an unmistakable aura of style about him, a sophistication that said he didn't belong in a godforsaken roadside tavern on a remote and seldom-traveled road through the desert. For a fleeting instant, Pitt thought the old cook looked vaguely familiar. On reflection, though, Pitt figured the man only resembled someone he couldn't quite place.

No. On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

Colored travelers needed to be aware of these borders whether they were riding the rails or not. The border sentiments spilled over into a general protocol that colored people had to live by. It determined whether or how easily they might find a room or food. They could look silly asking for a colored restroom in a border town that felt more northern than southern and presumptuous in a town that felt the opposite.

Transportation Sector The transportation sector is a close second to industry in terms of energy use. While air travel gets a bad rap, it is transport on highways that by far dominates this sector’s energy use, using more than 10 times the energy of air travel. Of this highway energy, about 75% is expended by small vehicles, the passenger cars and trucks used to move ourselves around. Amazingly, almost half of this is used on trips of less than 20 miles, mostly to get to and from work and for family responsibilities—things like church, shopping, and school. Of non-highway transport, air travel is the largest contributor, followed by ships and then trains. Incidentally, a fully loaded modern jet aircraft gets the equivalent of around 60 miles per gallon (MPG) per passenger, so for traveling long distances, they beat solo road trips in cars (but if you take four friends with you, even a gas-guzzling American car is not so bad—something hyped by the ride-share community). We can even see that the energy required to transport fossil fuels is significant, with about 1% of US energy use committed to transporting natural gas (we’ll come back to this later). Nearly half of freight-rail transportation is used to move coal—most of the other half is wheat and food. A not-so-surprising revelation from a close study

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

Among the tramps were some real bruisers, that was certain, but there were also men who had been badly bruised.

After the Second and Third Avenue Els were torn down, East Side property owners had prospered as brownstones, loft buildings, and tenements were replaced by high-rise offices and apartment buildings. The area east of Central Park between 59th and 96th Streets, known as the Upper East Side, became home to fashionable boutiques, luxury restaurants, and expensive furniture houses. With thousands of well-educated young professionals moving there, the neighborhood contained the greatest concentration of single people in the entire country.3 Even though the number of cars registered in the United States grew by 47 percent in the 1950s, New York City’s economy still relied on the subway in the early 1960s. During the 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. rush hour, 72 percent of the people entering the CBD traveled by subway, which could move people far more efficiently than automobiles. Each subway car could carry approximately one hundred people, and a ten-car train could accommodate a thousand. Since trains could operate every two minutes, each track could carry thirty thousand people per hour. By comparison, one lane of a highway could carry only about two thousand cars in an hour.4 Although Manhattan and the region were dependent on the rail transit system, 750,000 cars and trucks were entering the CBD on a typical weekday, three times more than had been the case thirty years earlier. Many New Yorkers expected the city to accommodate the growing number of cars. For example, the Greater New York Safety Council’s transportation division claimed that Americans had a fundamental freedom to drive, and that it was the city’s obligation to accommodate drivers by building more parking spaces in Manhattan. The members argued that without more parking, Manhattan would not be able to continue its role as the region’s CBD because a growing number of suburbanites were so highly conditioned to using their cars.5 In

Once, for example, on a train going across Canada, I began talking to a man everyone was avoiding because he was weaving and slurring his speech as if drunk. It turned out that he was recovering from a stroke. He had been an engineer on the same line we were riding, and long into the night he revealed to me the history beneath every mile of track: Pile O’Bones Creek, named for the thousands of buffalo skeletons left there by Indian hunters; the legend of Big Jack, a Swedish track-layer who could lift 500-pound steel rails; a conductor named McDonald who kept a rabbit as his traveling companion. As the morning sun began to tint the horizon, he grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes. “Thanks for listening. Most people wouldn’t bother.” He didn’t have to thank me. The pleasure had been all mine.

The old station, the one that stood when I arrived in 1926, was a Beaux-Arts marvel of pink granite and glass and steel that evoked not just travel by rail, but also travel through time: the splendor of an ancient Roman past, plus the possibility of a future where beauty and civic function are not just valued but understood to be in harmony.

I think we’re going to see a whole new wave of rapid industry transition—unlike the slow transition of, say, transportation, in which it took many years to go from rail to air travel. In this transition, you will see traditionally structured companies being seriously challenged by new, smaller, more efficient entrants—right away. The logical extension of the Internet’s cost efficiencies means that market share will flow to the most efficient companies, not the largest or the richest—companies that can deliver the greatest value to their customers will earn a higher profit while requiring far fewer assets. The productivity of their capital will be significantly improved over the traditional model because they will have replaced physical assets with information assets.

Spots of rain were falling but he couldn't see them. He had travelled by rail and walked from the station, making detours all the way: Blackwell's, his old college, anywhere, then north. Dusk had come early because of the trees.

It is perhaps not superfluous to point out here that throughout the 1830s and 1840s travel was still for the most part an activity for the rich or the adventurous. Most transportation on the European continent was by ship or mail coach, and it was time-consuming, expensive, and uncomfortable. Not until the emergence of the train did travel become an activity for the middle and lower middle class. Yet the railroads were still in their infancy under the July Monarchy. The first passenger railway was not built until 1837, and by 1840 only 433 kilometers of rail had been laid down. Then railroad building picked up speed; by 1848, 1,592 kilometers of rail lines were in use while 2,144 more were under construction. The railroads were to encourage yet a new kind of travel publication, the railroad guide or itinerary, which described and illustrated (in wood engravings or lithographs) the major sights along a particular line. However, this new type of publication, though it originated during the July Monarchy, did not become widespread until the Second Empire.

The first rail connection reached Titusville in 1862, eventually superseding the artificial-freshet mêlée. In its first fourteen months, the new Oil Creek Rail Road carried away more than 430,000 barrels of oil and delivered more than 459,000 empty barrels to the oil well sites; sixty thousand passengers traveled in and out of the region by rail during the same period.8 The ultimate improvement would be pipelines to move the oil from the wellhead to the railroad. Those came in various gauges from two to six inches, the oil flowing by gravity or pumped by steam, beginning in 1863.

The cold reality of it had struck her, as if, perched on the crest of a roller coaster, the rest of the ride was suddenly, irreversibly clear. On the way up, the vista had been infinite, the time to look about sometimes agonizingly long; now there was only the certain and dispassionate knowledge that there was one set of rails on which to travel, the ending immutable and about to begin. It didn’t matter that the rest of the trip might take twenty, even thirty years to complete; the angle of the ride had changed.

Toad must have been very accustomed to traveling this way, balanced on the back rails of a rushing buggy, but Melena was not. She gripped the sides and white-knuckled the rails with her knapsack sandwiched between her knees. Hazel was clamped onto the roof, grinning like an alligator in the sun. And Toad lounged like a cat.

Martz: That was my cat. Eli: Fine specimen. Martz: I saw you knock him off the bar. Eli: No. I kind of shooed him. I didn't really knock him... Martz: You raised your hand at him. Eli: Won't happen again, I promise you. Bartender: Hey, Martz, how about another drink? Martz: That cat's been coming here for two years. Its got more right to be here than you. Eli: I don't want any trouble. Martz: Well that's too bad. Cuz you got... Eli: [Eli slams Martz's head on the bar railing] "I know who you are. Murderer of innocent travelers on the road. You're gonna be held to account for the things you've done, do you know that? Do you?