Sleep on the Train

Overnight train is by far the best way to travel, ever. Trains in general are great, but an overnight train is absolutely amazing. For the price of a train ticket, you get the transportation, a bed for the night, and no time wasted in transit. I’m sold.

I slept intermittently through the night. Before I fell asleep I heard the horn of another train, and thought that it sounded a little bit odd... a little bit higher pitched than most. I thought about it for a few seconds, and a split second before the words "doppler effect" occurred to me, the train on the other tracks rushed by my window with a roar that sounded like a windy lion (What, you've never heard of a windy lion? Just think of the lion at the beginning of a movie, and add wind). The windy lion passed by 3 or 4 more times in the night. Another time I woke up to the boy in the next berth having a nightmare and waking up his sleepy and confused father. When I was asleep, I had a dream that I was at home. It was late and my parents were in bed, and I had the stereo on downstairs, but the bass was too loud. When I turned it down so they wouldn’t wake up, the knob turned but the stereo stayed the same volume, pumping out bass loud enough that I could feel the bump as it played. I woke up to find that it was the click-clack of the train on the tracks.

This all makes it sound like I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, but when I awoke in the morning, I felt well rested. We had stopped about an hour before our final destination, and I sat up and peeked out of the curtains. There was no evidence of civilization besides the station itself. Outside the station wall, a man stood on top of a large mound of dirt, watching the train. Over his shoulder, mountains of brown rose out of the desert. Over their shoulders, rocky, snow-capped peaks rose above the few clouds that hung in the sky. As the train pulled out of the station and continued along the foot of the mountains, I noticed that they began to glow a pinkish orange. I got up and went to the other side of the train to watch the sun rise over the desert. That’s probably one of the reasons I had such a positive reaction to the train ride.