The View Down the Tracks

 A perhaps somewhat strange thing that I like to do when I go to a new city--or even a new stop on a train line--or even an old city that I'm just visiting again--is to look around the city by peering down the railroad tracks and seeing what appears.

Most of the time, of course, this means that what I'm looking at is mostly more train tracks, but you can still get a vibe for a city and its transit by seeing just how the train tracks do--or don't--meld into their surroundings.

Sometimes you get tracks that disappear into the distance, giving you the impression that they go on forever.

Here in London, for instance, I don't really see much besides the tracks themselves (and that oncoming train) and it gives me the sense of a city where the train are arteries, connecting everything together in their own independent map of the city. There's a reason that non-geographic, systems-style maps work so well for trains, after all, and owe their prevalence at least in part to the Harry Beck London Underground map: London is that kind of city, with different connections popping up as you transit the city in different ways.

Other times, you get a different view.

This too is the UK, but here the trees and nature stand out to me; you get the sense of a place that can be accessed by train and not as much by car (false as that impression likely is) and thus the sense, again, that the train has different affordances, opens up different possibilities, than other forms of transit. 

Sometimes the view is more urban. Here the train station and its tracks blend not into nature, but into the urban environment, reminding you that the purpose of a train station is to bring you into the city, and to provide a portal between the space of transit and the space of life.

Sometimes the train gives you more of a sense of other trains than anything else: the endless width of a railyard is a sign of the coming together of so many other potential journeys and potential paths.

And sometimes, of course, what you really see is a parking lot.

Conversely, sometimes the tracks themselves are the road--used here by buses and trams--and so what you see is really the city, not a train station at all. These are very different views of the road from a station--and they tell you something about the difference between the way the trains and the cities operate.

I don't have much more of a point than that: sometimes my favorite kind of tourism is just staring down the tracks and seeing what this particular city has to show me.