oh, this is a cool idea! sorry about your experience with the e line – people are ALWAYS playing loud music/audio from their phones on public transit, and yeah it sucks :/ the sunglasses person could have been just sleeping, though (unless you could see their eyes through the glasses, in which case, yeah creepy!) – i’ve definitely worn sunglasses to sleep on the subway before lol. the piano sounds really cool though!! would be nice if it was in tune :p

one of my favorite train stories is from the summer i went to europe when i was eight – we took a train from prague to berlin, and it started out great: my family had our own little compartment with sliding glass doors like the hogwarts express, cushioned seats, and a little table. then, for whatever reason (i don’t remember exactly why, this was a while ago :p), we unexpectedly had to transfer onto another train. on this one, however, we didn’t have our own compartment, but at least we still had cushioned seats facing each other, and a (much smaller and flimsier) table. then, we had to transfer again! (and mind you, this was in germany, so all of the announcements were in german, and my family’s knowledge of german was limited to what my father had retained from high school-which wasn’t much! so every time we had to switch trains consisted of a frantic rush to find someone to translate for us so we didn’t miss our next train—a frantic rush in which my six year old sister and i and our giant suitcases were almost left behind, multiple times). our seats on the new train were all facing forward and we weren’t even all sitting together, but at least they still had (albeit much thinner) cushioning, and tray tables that folded down from the backs of the seats in front of us. our journey kept happening like this – we’d have to transfer trains, and each time, our seating arrangements would slightly downgrade until, on the last stretch before arriving in berlin, we were all standing or sitting on our suitcases in a dim train car filled entirely with bicycles. but, after like seven hours of what should have been a four hour trip, we made it to berlin!

another time, we took a train from dublin to sligo, and my dad and i sat across from the sweetest old woman, and we ended up playing cards with her. we figured she must be pretty religious, or something, because whenever it was her turn, she’d look up like she was praying. but i guess it worked, because she was good. like, really good. she won every single time. she got off a few stops before us, and then my sister came over to play cards with us, and after a round or two said, “you do realize that there is a mirror on the ceiling and i can see both of your cards, right?” 

@Sine, that’s so nice that you get to ride trains in your area! My area has very little public transport *sigh* Very concerning about the sunglasses man, though. But maybe he was just sleeping.

@pangolin, your train stories are so interesting! also omg you’re so luckyyyy to have gone to Germany and Ireland – I’d love to travel there someday. I wonder why the train car was filled with bicycles?

My experience with trains is pretty much just NYC – several times my family has traveled to NYC on the train. It’s generally really fun and exciting – there’s something so nice about the smooth glide, and sitting by the window watching the landscape roll by – but there’s nearly always something that goes wrong, like we go to the station to board and then the train is hours late to the station, or the train sits on the tracks for hours in the middle of a field and won’t move an inch. (This happened once, and it wasn’t that the train was broken down. It was just waiting for a freight train? Or something? Idk, but anyway it just wouldn’t move. And I had to just sit there and gaze at the flowers in the field.) But it’s still fun. the magazines they provide are always interesting, and you get to meet interesting people. One time my sister and I were playing cards with a couple of younger kids, and another time there was a middle-aged man behind me who was telling his companion all about his life and ideas. He always has turkey on Thanksgiving, supports universal health care, and I also got to learn a bunch of other things about him that I now forgot :/ Oh, and there was one time when I was on a train, heading back from NYC, and the train went passed a castle on an island. It was amazing. And Grand Central Station is really nice, but not Penn Station, at least for me – it’s kind of dark and dirty and dangerous-looking…

Then there are the subways, which are just fascinating. There was one time when there was a man playing an accordion, and once some acrobats came on and did tricks…

I also got to go on trains in Portugal. Those were probably my favorites. They were really clean and comfortable and airy, and they went so fast! You could get from Porto to Lisbon in just a matter of hours. And the landscape was so scenic… cork trees and golden fields and donkeys standing in their pastures with baby donkeys. I don’t remember meeting any particular people, though. What with jet lag and all, I kind of fell asleep for some of the train ride :/