In Anna Karenina, which isn’t that old, published 1873–1877, trains are a central symbol for encroaching modernity. Tolstoy hated trains. He hated the sort of travel they enabled, thought the world should be slower. When Tolstoy was writing Anna Karenina he was halfway down the path of his unique christianity that would define the end of his life, built around individual total kindness and effort to produce that kindness. In the scene where Levin chops the grass with the serfs in the rain, one of the most famous scenes of the book, Levin puts in personal effort to complete a task that he didn’t have to do personally, but him doing it personally made him a stronger person. Trains bypassed the personal effort to travel places.
Anna Karenina the character has horrible feverish nightmares on a train to St. Petersburg at the start of the novel, and she famously impulses flings herself in front of a train in the most significant event of the book, the part that everyone knows. The equivalent sort of metaphor against modernity today would be a protagonist getting run over by a self-driving Uber they called, but it would be uglier since you’d have to talk about brands, and the character would have to be standing out on the sidewalk waiting for a car, not standing at a train station, which is a much prettier place. Maybe train stations were uglier in comparison then though.
As technology has advanced forward, trains are now nostalgic objects. The fresh-faced children dream of an America connected by high-speed passenger rail, one where they don’t have to ask mom to drive them to their friends’ house or to Chicago for the weekend, one where they could travel on a long but not too long journey to LA or NYC with other passengers to talk to, kids who have lived their lives inside of automobiles between home and school and crave some sort of public space even if it’s one that only exists as a transitory one between two private spaces. The autistic love trains now. Or maybe people who love trains are autistic. The rigid rails of the train feel comforting and the variety of brightly colored train engines are something fun to collect. You can catch the rare trains at particular spots near you at given times and days, if you follow their schedules.
I like walking on this trail, paved on top of the former railway, where they used to ship manufactured goods between cities, unnecessary now with the automobile offering decentralized and precise shipping compared to the rigid straight line of trains. The railway used to cut through cornfields and soyfields, but now suburbs have pushed their way here, suburbs that came up after the railway had already been decommissioned, until this trail, to give the people in the suburbs who have to drive their car to go anywhere a nice place to walk. I like the weeds and native flowers and invasive plants that grow on the side of the rail trail. Whatever flowers are in season you can always find on the side of the rail trail. Unlike normal parks, rail trails are miles long, so they can’t be easily maintained by the rule by blade of a lawnmower. As you walk down the long straight path, it feels like you’re walking through a gallery of the world you live in every day showing its insides to you.
Trains have this unique feature relative to other modes of transportation that made them a good metaphor in Anna Karenina: they travel in straight lines. A train has no agency, it can’t change its mind like a person or car can, it can’t turn around if it left you or a toothbrush behind. The straight line makes Anna’s death feel inevitable, prophesized, especially for a book as ornately constructed as Anna Karenina is. Now, on the trail that used to be a rail, I like walking in this straight line, straight line cut through the trees, path visible until the horizon, knowing that it goes on farther than I could ever walk in this one night. It’s nice knowing that things won’t end.
