Top 5 Reasons to Travel by Night Train

Haley Sweetland Edwards is an OPC Foundation Scholar from 2009. She is a freelance writer whose work has appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times, AOL News and
Global Post.


 

Photographer Paul Stephens and I took three overnight trains over the course of four days last week. It was a personal record, and I’ve decided that by merely surviving the experience, I am now one of the world’s foremost experts on all things night train. So, listen up.

Night trains are basically the best form of transportation for five reasons:

1) They’re cheap. Especially when you’re traveling in Azerbaijan , where a smelly hotel with no toilet paper will run you a cool Benjamin/night. Compare that with a night in “kupe” (the night train’s shared cabin with 4 bunks and a door), which’ll run you about $5, or “platzkart” (a shared cabin with 6 bunks, no door, and the distinct feeling that you’re in the bilge of a 19th century immigrant ship), which’ll run you $3.50.

2) They’re sort of romantic, right? Nevermind that you’re bunked up next to five overweight Iranians, all of whom fall asleep within forty-five seconds of leaving the platform and so treat you, for the next 7 hours, to a relentless chorus of snoring, hacking, gurgling and moaning so pitiful that you begin to suspect one of them is either suffering from a terrible communicable disease, or giving birth.

3) They’re relaxing. Especially at half past three in the morning when your train passes another train going Mach 4 and you bolt awake to the comforting sound of metal rubbing against metal at high speeds, combined with the high-pitched screeching of train brakes and what sounds like panicked screaming in a language you don’t understand.

4) They improve your balance. The train’s only bathroom is an airless metal room slightly smaller than your average phone booth, outfitted with a hole in the middle of the floor, where you can watch the tracks whiz by below. When, after waiting in line for forty minutes behind three-dozen men, and it’s your turn to use the hole, you must account for the bucking and rocking of the train whilst crouching in such a way that no part of your body touches any part of the metal room, most especially the floor, which is, perhaps not mysteriously, covered in a good half-inch of gently sloshing fluid.

5) You look really well-rested in the morning. Case and point. That’s a little something I like to call “puff-chic.”