For the first century of our nation’s history, cities and towns set their own times based on the rising and setting of the sun, resulting in more than 144 local times in North America.

As railroads expanded, they found it impossible to coordinate schedules on the same tracks. Thus, in 1883, the major railroads came together to establish local time zones across the United States, giving birth to the time zones we know today.

Time changes on a train

And yet, nearly a century and a half later, many long-distance train passengers feel that time shifts when they step aboard a train.

For example, Thibault Constant has ridden and reviewed more than 250 train rides around the world, including almost every Amtrak route. To him, an Amtrak long-distance ride, delays and all, is an escape from the time that governs our lives.

“You take the time to do absolutely everything you want. You take the time to read, you take the time to spend one hour at the window, you take the time to go to the cafe car and get one coffee. The same when you eat, when you go to the dining car, you spend one or two hours there and you don't even think about it.

I've been on all the long-distance Amtrak routes and every time, every time, the trip went by like that, really. Just because I feel like you're in a kind of bubble where you're cut from time.

You’re in a space, in a zone.”

His thoughts on time read like a description of C.S. Lewis’ land of Narnia, where you step through a door and time exists on a different plane.

Likewise, in the first chapter of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, journalist Henry Kisor has similar words for how time is perceived on a long-distance Amtrak train.

“Train time means large blocks of leisure to rest, to read a book cover to cover, to write a few thousand words on my laptop computer in the warm privacy of a sleeper compartment, or simply to woolgather, letting my imagination carry me where it will. Just as important, a subtle alteration in the perception of time occurs aboard a long-distance train. Everything seems to run more slowly, including my emotional and intellectual metabolism. Arrival at my destination is many hours, even days away; without the pressure of the clock, I feel more relaxed, patient, confident, ready to open myself to new adventures and connections.”

Why is train time so different?

For me, stepping on a train marks a freedom from day-to-day responsibilities.

Even on a weekend with no work obligations, my mind is filled with things I should be doing — chores, errands, etc. (Japanese minimalist and author Fumio Sasaki calls it our “silent to-do list”).

And even being on vacation in Europe, where I am free from work and home responsibilities, time still exists, perhaps even more so, as my mind has an acute awareness that my time there is finite, and I need to make the most of it while I am there.

But on a train, time seems endless, and there is no pressure to experience as much as possible. You are embedded in the experience.

Occasionally, I have similar feelings on a plane, but only on those rare occasions where I have a comfortable seat. Unlike a train, I cannot move about, enjoy a view, or have a conversation. But I am stripped of responsibilities and distractions, and forced to slow down, enjoy a book or a movie — or jot down memories from my trip.

Similarly, as he set out on his first of 18,000 miles of Canadian cross-country trip in 1990 — long before the smartphone kept us tethered to our responsibilities — Terry Pindell wrote in Last Train to Toronto: A Canadian Rail Odyssey:

“Three days and three nights to Vancouver with nothing to do but read, eat, sleep, watch the passing landscape, and talk to people. There will be no telephone calls, no mail, no TV, no traffic, no supervisors. There will be no appointments, no social entanglements, no family responsibilities, no community obligations, no promises, no identity save what I create out of whole cloth during this passage. If not heaven, this is at least the opportunity to be temporarily born again.”

To Pindell, the absence of phone calls and television does not mean he will be doing nothing. It instead gives him time to focus on what he wants to focus on. And to him, that time is heavenly.

‘Not doing’ is different from ‘doing nothing’

In Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, the author is clear that her point in writing the book is not, as some may interpret the title, to advocate a total retreat from the world and actually do nothing.

Instead, she speaks of the value of “refusing productivity and stopping to listen” in order to “think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves.”

“To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”

For many, train travel can be similar. What some might see as boring is actually an opportunity to focus on so much more — namely, minute details in the landscape or the life stories of fellow travelers, but also one’s own thoughts.

When I had this discussion with my Environmental Psychology professor — and advisor on this project — he said it reminded him of the Daoist concept of Wu Wei, which, while sometimes translated as “non-action” or “not-doing,” (similar to the title of Odell’s book), more accurately refers to moving with the ebb and flow of what is around you.

“Wu Wei does not involve excessive effort or struggle, but a kind of ‘going with the flow’ where we are able to move with the energy of the moment and respond freely to whatever situation that arises.”

These words, from coach and writer Chip Richards, could just as easily apply to train travel. We are not “doing nothing,” but we are moving with a flow that was determined for us more than a century ago.

Being on a train is like a state of flow, in more ways than one

Productivity experts talk a lot about achieving a “state of flow.”

First defined by Mihály Csikszentmihalyi in 1970, the state of flow involves focusing on one’s work — or some task at hand — without distraction, worry or self reflection. Again, this is generally in the context of productivity, i.e., achieving a state of flow in one’s work.

But in The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, Eric J. Leed refers to the flow state in the context of traveling.

The state of passage, he writes, absorbs travelers into its own order, and they forget about places external to that state of passage.

Leed writes that Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow perfectly describes the structure of passage, “which imposes an inevitable and irresistible logic of sequence on those who commit themselves to the path.”

Indeed, train travel is flow because it requires no conscious action on the part of the traveler. When I am sitting on a train, I am committed to the flow of the train, propelled forward by a diesel locomotive, my attention transfixed by the constant motion.

In In Motion: The Experience of Travel, longtime New Yorker staff writer Tony Hiss finds comfort and freedom in this predetermined flow, calling it the “slowly accumulated and carefully tended trail of forethought.”

“You don’t have to know the railroad’s history to know you’re not by yourself or to realize that even the leaders of your small caravan, the engineer and conductor, the train crew, are themselves never acting alone, and are constantly being helped along, guided, and have been thought about by a long chain of current and former colleagues that stretches back, in this case, to the original nineteenth-century way finders, grade levelers, and track layers, who laid out the route unfolding before you, a path that has a definite terminus and a published time of arrival. In these circumstances, remembering that you don’t know where you are or what will happen next brings with it the reassurance that for the time being you don’t have to do anything about this situation.

The railroad’s intention is not to move your mind forward, but it is in the process of moving your body forward safely and in relative comfort. It’s no more than a “half a loaf” setting, but it’s one that the mind can nibble on. Energized, untethered, unhurried, and protected, your mind can be free to explore any subject at all, because all possibilities lie open.”

Unlike driving, where one is constantly making decisions — and perhaps fearful of the potential for reckless decisions by other drivers — on a train, one merely follows a path already charted.

For some, being in motion induces ‘think time’

Perhaps it is the rare combination of being in motion without any navigating decisions that makes train travel a unique moment for becoming lost in thought.

Hiss writes that in this situation, his thoughts move like the train:

“My thoughts, previously drifting by in ones and twos, were multitudinous and seemed airborne, sometimes racing ahead of the still-lumbering train, sometimes darting off and slicing behind a line of snow-clad hills that had just appeared off to my right as the train crossed a broad, shallow valley. “

As his thoughts move forward with the train, he writes that his mind is “brought to a higher level of alertness.”

He mentions this to an architect friend of his who subsequently sends him a note about what she calls “think time.”

“Think time. Curiously, some of my most mentally productive hours have been spent in long-distance transit—trains or buses. I enjoy a good interval of speeding scenery. It induces a spatial detachment and the time suspension necessary for bold thoughts to race ahead. It’s much like being carried by music, which buoys you along at its own speed, jostling your emotions. Sensations of speed encourage the mind to dart, and the eyes to fasten momentarily on speeding objects and crystalize new understandings around them. Feeling gently cradled, hustled by occasional weightlessness, the mind is freed and the eyes can skim the moving horizon for insight, thinking ever more audacious thoughts.”

Personally, I find that I can neither read a book on a train, nor is it an ideal time to think about anything unrelated to the train trip. I can, however, understand Hiss’ observation that the mind can go into a heightened state of awareness.

As I wrote earlier in this project about landscapes and fellow travelers, my thoughts zero in on these aspects of the train: Where am I on a map, how was this landscape formed, what are these towns like, who are the people around me, and who would be most interesting to talk to.

But for Hiss and others, movement can prompt serious “think time”

Hiss writes about evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who used his time on a 1972 bus ride from Chicago to Bloomington, Indiana, to disprove the prevalent notion that there were deep genetic differences between human beings with different skin color.

And, biochemist Kary B. Mullins invented the polymerase chain reaction — the DNA testing used in criminal cases — while driving through the redwood country north of San Francisco:

“Ideas tumbled out, he said, producing three “Eureka” moments. Once he stopped the car to make a few calculations, and toward the end of his trip, he recalled, “I stopped the car again. ‘Dear Thor!’ I exclaimed. I had solved the most annoying problems in DNA chemistry in a single lightning bolt.””

Lost in thought: Train time can bring interior exploration

Sitting at Cheshire Cheese restaurant in Vancouver after a long train ride through British Columbia, Pindell, the aforementioned author of the American and Canadian rail odysseys, found himself being interrogated by a waitress who asks him what he has learned on his travels. He rattles off a series of insights about Canadians — and the waitress interrupts:

“But what about yourself? Whenever you go out to explore the world you end up finding out that you’re exploring your inner world as well — previously unknown hopes and dreams, hidden limitations and strengths, unacknowledged failures and opportunities.”

Pindell says that question would haunt him for thousands of miles down the tracks.

Jenny Diski, too, writes about looking inward while traveling, at least while in the planning phases of her weeks-long ride around the United States. An accomplished author, she did not consider herself a travel writer. She wanted to travel by train in order to get lost in her thoughts — and chose to write about it in Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions because “I have to earn a living.”

“I want to be in or move through empty spaces in circumstances where nothing much will happen,” she wrote, noting that she did not feel compelled to bring the world to people or meet interesting characters.

“I just want to drift in the actual landscapes of my daydreams,” she added, imagining several long-distance train trips spent staring out the window, daydreaming.

And indeed, her trip began that way, although not on the rails. She sailed to the United States aboard a cargo ship.

“After a very short time, when you are traveling so far at such a snail’s pace, and with no urgent need (or in my case, any need at all) to get where you are going, you become an aficionado of detail. I took on the task of witnessing the sea, as if someone, somewhere had to be constantly alert to its shits and nuances, and here and now the job was mine I kept an eye on the windows when I brushed my teeth for fear of missing something.”

This is exactly how I feel on a train, no matter how boring the landscape. Whether it’s a small town or just a shift in the color of the vegetation, I am constantly aware of what is outside.

It should be noted, however, that Diski did not, in the end, drift across the American landscape lost in her own thoughts.

Instead, she spent much of the trip in conversation with her fellow passengers — at least that is what she wrote about — each one of whom she found more interesting than she ever expected.

Time does not always slow down on a train

To be fair, I have to admit, sometimes I am impatient.

In April 2022, I retraced Hiss’ journey between Rutland and DC. I made detailed notes about what I saw along the way, and I look back on the trip with fond memories of experiencing a new route.

But this trip was delayed, and I told myself in my notes that I was failing my own assignment.

I was present to experience the train, and yet I was preoccupied with our late arrival time. It is not the attitude an Amtrak traveler is supposed to have, but a natural, understandable attitude nonetheless.

More recently, in March 2023, my trip to New Orleans aboard the Crescent was nearly six hours behind schedule due to a brush fire near the tracks in Edison, NJ.

While I enjoyed the ride, I was perhaps overly conscious of time, frequently checking our estimated arrival into New Orleans. I really wanted to end my day with a nightcap at the Sezerac Bar at the Roosevelt Hotel, just a block from where I was staying.

Our scheduled arrival time of 9:02 pm would have given me plenty of time, even if we were delayed a few hours. A few hours turned into four, then five, then nearly six hours, forcing me to abandon that plan — but I still obsessed about time, especially concerned about how little sleep I would have in New Orleans after we finally rolled into Union Station at 2:45 am.

• • •

I have pulled together many anecdotes here: Hiss on a train, Lewontin on a bus, Mullins in a car, Diski on a ship and a train, and my own thoughts on trains and planes. They all share one common characteristic, and that is being in motion.

In The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, Eric J. Leed writes about the state of passage, where the passenger becomes an observer of the world that flows past:

“There is not yet a psychology of travel, but if there were it would have to focus on the pleasures inherent, for some, in motion; its autoletic characteristics, the manner in which passage through space shapes the experience of time and perception in general.”

Why does motion induce pleasure?

Tony Hiss addressed that, in part in In Motion: The Experience of Travel. Hiss includes a discussion on the origins of human beings, specifically, the moment in time that early hominids learned to stand upright, for the first time able to see beyond the tall grasses of the savannas — and a time when they could not easily climb a tree and withdraw to a safe place.

“Once hominins entered into the complexities and uncertainties of this enlarged setting for life, “wanderlust” may, after close examination, have turned out to have been not so much a thirsting for travel as it was an ongoing need for motion. We may come to think of “wanderlust” as a shorthand way of acknowledging the “unanchoring” of hominin life at this time, as walking ushered in a period when travel became an almost permanent, slow condition after there were no longer any sanctuaries to retreat to.”

In a related piece, Hiss writes about how human beings crave information similar to how we seek food, or a mate, suggesting that travel might be rooted in that craving. In, Why Travel? Understanding our Need to Move and How it Shapes our Lives, Hiss connects our love of travel with the findings of zoologist Desmond Morris, who suggested that neophilia, a love for the novel and for innovation, developed among primates and has been inherited by humanity.

As human beings, many of us are constantly in a quest to see more.

Our wanderlust may be rooted in a sense of curiousity ingrained in our DNA. We may like to be in motion because, in our earliest days, finding new information was necessary for our survival.

And for many, train travel can tap into that desire, offering the visual and tactile experience of moving across the landscape, seeing and feeling something different around every bend.

⮕ Railroads may have torn apart the 19th-century landscape, but policy decisions in the 20th-century sent passenger rail into a downward spiral, just at a time when they could have been key to smarter, greener development and transportation. Read more about railroads and environmental justice on the next page.

Bibliography

Diski, J. (2003). Stranger on a train: Daydreaming and smoking around America with interruptions (1st Picador pbk. ed). Picador : Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers.

Hiss, T. (2017). In motion: The experience of travel. Routledge.

Kisor, H. (2015). Zephyr: Tracking a dream across America. CreateSpace.

Leed, E. J. (1991). The mind of the traveler: From Gilgamesh to global tourism. Basic Books.

Niblett, M. I., & Beuret, K. (Eds.). (2021). Why travel? Understanding our need to move and how it shapes our lives. Bristol University Press.

Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

Pindell, T. (1992). Last train to Toronto: A Canadian rail odyssey (1st ed). H. Holt.

van der Linden, D., Tops, M., & Bakker, A. B. (2021). The Neuroscience of the Flow State: Involvement of the Locus Coeruleus Norepinephrine System. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 645498. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.645498