Kraftwerk Had it Right Fifty Years Ago

Travelling by train has always been my preferred method. It is comfortable, is good value (at least on the continent), and there is sufficient legroom to sit and play cards on a table (or quietly meditate on existence). As well as this, for reasons only known to evolution, I seem to feel less anxious hurtling at 200 mph sat on a train than I do in an 80mph car or 600mph plane. And what’s good for my hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis can also be good for the environment. Look out for that slogan on a t-shirt near you.

The experience on the Eurostar, cross-country training, has always felt to me less, well, hyper-capitalist, than flying. I am free to exercise my impatient demands for—and indeed expectations of—low-cost rapid travel without being force-fed eau de toilette in Duty Free. And nor am I asked to donate a fake plastic tree to offset a tonne of carbon dioxide I am responsible for emitting. Or charged 8€ for a limp microwaved chicken wrap to be consumed in a recycled-air fuselage.

Zipping across the garden of England, I smugly sank into my chair, patting myself on the back for being better than everyone else. Before I knew it, I was tunnelling through a hole seventy-five metres below the bottom of the English Channel, with the gentle laptop-tapping of businesspeople and the souls of long-dead Doggerland burials keeping me company.

As I sipped my americano bought in the departure lounge, I reflected that seamless cross-border train journeys such as this might well represent a case in point of the goodness that can be born out of the utopian ideals of the modern European project. Clean, efficient, and integrative. The gentle rhythms of the train reminded me of the techno-optimism of Kraftwerk on their album Trans-Europe Express. We whizzed past parks, hotels and palaces, promenades and avenues. I was in the centre of Amsterdam before lunchtime.

No need for a connection, change. I’d already showed my passport to an uninterested handsome Frenchman at the English border, so I was straight out into the cerebrospinal fluid-coloured afternoon of late Autumn. The city shone. I dropped my bags off, and, within six hours of leaving my home, was headed to the conference hall.

The process was just as satisfactory headed back to Blighty. There was time for a small glass of jenever - original Dutch gin sipped from little hourglasses- before boarding the train at Amsterdam Centraal after the end of the conference. In departures, many familiar faces. The whole King’s College contingent seemingly had had the same idea as me. And why not? After an easy check in process, a couple of tins of Eurostar IPA, and four comfortable hours, we were safely back in the centre of London.

Life is tough enough without the stress of flying and impending ecological collapse weighing upon our shoulders. I’d have no hesitation whatsoever spending a hundred quid on the Eurostar to Amsterdam and back again, and all the better if forward-thinking projects like IGUANA are able to help with reimbursements. Kraftwerk had it right, fifty years ago. Whether you are a hero who wishes to save the world, or just someone like me who wants to find the path of least resistance, train travel is indeed the surest option for a timeless future.