A Week of Slow Trains
The fast connection saves ninety minutes and costs you the whole middle of the country. This autumn I took the regional line instead: seven hours, eleven stops, a dining car that closed at two.
Arriving, gradually
Somewhere past the third river the landscape stopped being scenery and became geography. Fields turned to orchards, orchards to rooftops. A conductor told me which village made the best bread, and he was right.
I wrote most of these pages on a folding table with a paper cup of tea sliding slowly toward the edge.