Reflecting on The Rails

Image credit: Samuel Borenstein http://www.heffel.com/Artist/Buy/Canadian/Samuel_Borenstein.aspx

As I was writing my earlier post about train travel, with the deep and lasting influence it holds over me to this day, I began to have flashbacks of my opportunity to choose trains rather than cars or airplanes over the decades.

As I pondered, I recall my own Father’s wonderful collection of model tracks and trains, engines and freight cars, passenger cars with tiny windows, and how every Christmas we were all filled with joy and delight when it was time to set up his collection beneath the branches of the tree, and how excited we were as children to wait breathlessly until time to light it up, finally, but not until Christmas Eve. And then we knew!!

I dwelt for a while on the fact that my Mother, an adventurous woman to whom I owe a great deal, for inspiring in me the courage to live life on my own terms, never flew on an airplane her entire life! For Mother, it was a train, thank you very much, she so loved the trains. So it seems I come by my affection for the rails honestly!

Although a busy life, and many claims on my attention since that post have passed by, I keep coming back to the thought that I never really considered trains to be an unusual choice, or a different way to go from here to there, and back again! I always found taking a train to be such a natural choice, and lived in countries where hopping on a train was a way of life, that now as I reflect on how many train rides I have taken, I feel a sense of astonishment.

How I have never separated these parts of my story, or even counted the number of trains I have ridden, or the number of countries where I have experienced and enjoyed riding the rails, is equally astonishing, and so I am now drawn to put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard – it is 2016, after all), and reminisce a little while.

I hope you will enjoy some of my early traveller/blogger tales, long before we considered ourselves to be bloggers, before a venue like the Internet existed to share our adventures. Journalling was the thing, random ticket stubs found in pages of an old journal, or a keepsake volume of poetry, are a pleasant reminder of days gone by, the memories of which remain clear and unvarnished so many decades later!!

More soon, I hope and promise!! Canada, the USA, New Zealand, Australia, India, Nepal, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France: so many memories to sort through, so little time!!

Bye for now!