We take for granted the privilege that air travel affords us. The reduced duration, the absence of landscape, the cocooning within a humming capsule. All of it is engineered for our utmost convenience.
Conversely, deeper platonic and even platonic connections were probably forged on long rail trips. Steamships too, but get caught in a storm and any kind of romance gets quickly thrown overboard. There is something about a train that is unlike any other form of transport. It is communal, yet private, slow, and yet steady. It probably is the reason for Emerson’s (now cliched koan) that “It's not the destination, it's the journey.”
And the only train ride to go up the length of Peninsular Malaysia in this fashion is the East Coast Railway line, that starts at JB Sentral and ends up at Tumpat in Kelantan. But my particular journey carries on all the way to Songkhla in the south of Thailand.
