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| Dresden Hbf Camera X-T1 Focal Length: 10mm Exposure: 1/30, f/6.4, ISO1600 |
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| Track 9 Camera: X-T1 Focal Length: 20mm Exposure: 1/30, f/10. ISO1600 |
We climb the steps to the upper tracks and find track nine. Our fellow travelers are already milling about the advertisement boards, vending machines, and benches. Car 28 is going to be our home for the next 5 hours and that will supposedly end up in section D of the track. I love how organized Deutsche Bahn can be when it really wants to. The train rolls in promptly and we wait a few moments for some of its passengers to disembark. Then we climb aboard. We happened upon a convenient deal on tickets for this trip. So, for the journey home we will be enjoying the plush seats and quiet repose of a first class car. This is an ICE train, which will end its run in Frankfurt with only a few pauses in cities along the way. This sort of ICE sports a dining car, free WiFi, and WC's that probably have paper towels and soap. Even in an era far past the Golden Age of rail travel, there is still something very comforting and pleasing about a form of transport that speeds through the best parts of the countryside while still allowing you see it accompanied by the possibilities of fresh coffee, a cheese bun, and the ability to use a civilized bathroom without temporarily halting the journey. On some trains the difference between first and second class is barely noticeable, but on a DB ICE it means you get a porter who offers to bring your drinks and most of the seats come paired with a table. Five hours on this train? I'd happily take 10! Without any worries of transfers, a fresh blanket of snow outside, and a nice plush seat to settle into, I could happily ride this train for a very, very long time.
The train pushes away from the platform and we slowly begin to roll through that strange wasteland of cables and rails that make up the suburbs of a major rail station. We pass the backside of the Dresden's famous Yenidze, the former tobacco factory built to look like a mosque. Today it houses offices, but still appears quite out of place amidst the outskirts of Dresden.
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| Yenidze Camera: X-E2 Focal Length: 28.9mm Exposure: 1/180, f/9, ISO1600 |
I snap some pictures of this bizarre, blighted environment. Derelict cement buildings of unknown purpose sit between the operational and abandoned rail lines. Most are covered in graffiti, very few have windows. They look like houses, but none appear to be in use. However, as we pass the last one, I jump at the sight of a man in a sleeveless undershirt leaning out of a window (with no frame or glass) to smoke a cigarette.
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Wasteland
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We finally pass into the suburbs of Dresden itself. We glide through neighborhoods of apartments over small shops where we gaze in a voyeuristic way onto back balconies strung with laden clothes lines and neglected oddments and through windows to see people watching television or having lunch. Then we move into the neighborhoods of single family homes with their perfectly level lawns and manicured shrubs, all draped in the morning's snow. We see abandoned trampolines, sagging slightly from the weight of the snowfall, but most of this world is hidden behind hedges. Then, we enter the strange world of the Schrebergärten. It is miles and miles of tiny garden allotments cordoned off by fences constructed of anything its owners could get their hands on, from corrugated tin to car doors. This region seems to be a vast set from a post-apocalyptic movie. Some gardens are dearly loved and well maintained even in the winter, others have been left to their own devices. We can see through the grimy back windows of sheds and trailers, catching glimpses of glass jars and spray cans. Beer bottles lie behind some in vast piles, with the intent that no one would see them. You can learn a lot about people from a train window. Then, suddenly and without any warning we burst into the open countryside. It is a vast, wide open world of white, dotted here and there by rows of trees.
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| Speeding Through Winter's World Camera X-E2 Focal Length: 18mm Exposure: 1/180, f/14, ISO2000 |
Hills rise and fall and sometimes we enter the deep clefts of a river valley. The sight of people walking, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, is not rare. Sunday is Wandern Tag. You see them moving through the winter blasted landscape alone, in couples, or in groups. Dogs leap through snowdrifts, children pull each other on sleds. Occasionally, we see tiny specks of sledders on distant hillsides, gliding down or veering off and dumping their passengers in the fresh powder. When I think of Winter, I often visualize these scenes in my mind's eye. I take each frame, captured in the edges of our window, and store them as small postcards. This is the way January should look, grey skies, drifts, swirling snow, smoke rising out of chimneys, ice forming on river banks, and people walking with red cheeks and laughter and the promise of a hot drink at the end.
The level of snow increases and decreases as we pass further west. Sometimes it sits at a half meter along sidewalks, sometimes it is just a powdery dust on farm fields, sometimes it is barely there at all. The conductor announces our imminent arrival in Leipzig. We once again pass the Schrebergärten, neighborhoods, apartments, and quiet outskirts of yet another city. The elderly couple across the aisle from us begin to wrap up their newspapers and casually organize their things. They have been laughing quietly every now and then over articles in their papers and ordered teas instead of coffee. They remind me of retired couples we know at home, the ones who are always impeccably dressed and well informed. They contribute money to the symphony, listen religiously to NPR, and collect New Yorker cartoons on their fridges. This couple strikes me as the sort that know a great deal about a great many things and that having a conversation with them wouldn't be a waste of time.
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| Catching Up on the News Camera: X-E2 Focal Length: 32.9mm Exposure: 1/60, f/3.6, ISO1600, LR Custom Preset Edit |
Before long, we begin to slow as we enter the massive steel complex of Leipzig station. Pylons rise above the tracks forming a skeletal forest of steel and the massive canopies of the station begin to loom in the distance.
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| Steel Forest Camera: X-E2 Focal Length: 39mm Exposure: 1/125, f/9, ISO2000 |
I get the feeling that this scene could be exactly the same a century ago, that train stations have always looked this way- a snarl of metal on a foundation of gravel and cinder. Perhaps the air was blacker in the past, but this is the way it has always been, more or less.
We linger in Leipzig to change conductors and porters. The elderly couple disembarks. Our empty coffee mugs are gathered up and we take the pause to open up those sandwiches from Dresden. They are small with just turkey, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. But, the bread is soft and whatever sauce they spread under the cheese has a nice tang. I could easily eat two more if given the chance. We watch the new arrivals stroll along the platform to find their cars. Someone jumps out for a quick smoke, just before the whistle blows and stuffs their lighter and pack of cigarettes back into their coat in frustration before leaping back inside. We roll back out the way we came, back into the white wilderness between German cities.
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| Sunshine Cometh Camera X-E2 Focal Length: 18mm Exposure: 1/180, f/14, ISO2000 |
We stop again in Fulda and pick up a new occupant for across the aisle. He hauls on a suitcase, wardrobe bag, and a jumbled assortment of sacks. A slight man, he reminds me of an eccentric professor or perhaps a writer. Papers are soon strewn all over his table and he's constantly getting up and down to retrieve a forgotten item from his luggage. He orders a snack and a coffee from the porter and attacks his bun in a mouse-like manner, ripping it apart carefully into tiny pieces before eating the bits one at a time.
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| The Writer Camera: X-E2 Focal Length: 24.3 Exposure: 1/180, f/3.6, ISO2000, LR Custom Preset Edit |
The light gets lower in the sky. There are less people out now, and the snow is fading from the landscape to just a dusting. Frankfurt isn't far now. More towns and small cities flash past the window, more sheds, gardens, balconies, and hedges. More lives and stories glimpsed for an instant, never to be seen again. This is the strange dimension of a train trip. You can see the world from your window, but you are not a part of it. In fact, you dwell within your own. It smells of upholstery and plastic. Its sounds are of rocking train cars over tracks and hushed voices. Food and drink come wrapped in plastic. Your fellow inhabitants come and go with barely a word, though hours spent beside each other make you members of an unspoken tribe, that of the traveller. This tribe is made up of bankers, writers, progressive retirees, families, children, grandparents, police officers, students, tourists, conductors, porters, engineers, backpackers, and the occasional photographer. Our little world encased in steel and plastic passes through the outside world of sky, snow, and concrete and the scenes of the old model railway play out before our eyes.
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