Fools rush in and lose out

A quiet train station in Italy

About a year ago I needed to travel from Turin to Naples. I decided to take the train – usually my preferred option – and then looked at the options on the Trenitalia website. I hadn’t realised there would be a fast train, covering the 550 miles from the capital of Piedmont to the great city of the south in less than six hours. But on reflection I decided to take the slow train, overnight, covering the same distance in about twice the time.

There was a financial consideration: the fast train cost three or four times as much and the slow one would save a night in a hotel. But my main reason for choosing the slow train was more instinctive. I could imagine what the experience of travelling in the fast train would be like: more or less streamlined, in aeroplane-style seating, not offering much opportunity to savour the journey. Soulless and sanitised, in two words.

The slow train journey, by contrast, was much less predictable. Who would be sharing my carriage? Would the train be overrun by thieves and pickpockets the moment it crossed the invisible dividing line between north and south (an unworthy fantasy, I know)? Would I get any sleep?

In the end I rather enjoyed the journey. Of course it was too dark to see anything until a rainy dawn broke somewhere over the Maremma in southern Tuscany. The train stopped quite frequently; my compartment was sometimes pretty empty and sometimes full. But everyone was civilised and throughout the journey I had the company of a Neapolitan in his 70s, whose son had brought him on to the train at Turin. We hardly exchanged any words but I found his quiet company reassuring. Above all, the journey felt like a slice of life, that is an authentically Italian slice, with as much flavour as one or several slices of good Italian salami. The train made an unscheduled stop at a small station south of Rome and everyone got out to have their morning ristretto.

All this set your slow lane man thinking about his core area, speed and slowness. Everyone assumes that a fast train is better than a slow train; indeed the benefits of speed have been so highly rated by the British government that it has given the go-ahead to a high-speed train line between London and Birmingham, shortening the journey time by 30 minutes, whose cost is estimated to be an astonishing £33bn.

Arguments rage over the cost-benefit and carbon-saving calculations used to justify the project. The latter seem especially flaky: a government command paper claiming that high-speed rail produces less than half as much carbon as conventional railways, and a fraction that of cars, is contradicted by a paper commissioned for the Department of Transport in 2007. It reckons that high-speed rail journeys to Manchester will produce more than 60 per cent more carbon than conventional rail and 35 per cent more than cars. And the fact that the line will cut through one of the most beautiful parts of southern England, the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with potential damage (according to wildlife organisations) to up to 160 wildlife sites including 50 ancient woodlands, seems to count not a jot with “the greenest government ever”.

One aspect of the cost-benefit analysis particularly interests me. This is the idea that tens of billions will be saved because a quantum of the waste time spent on the train will be converted to profitable working time. Critics have pointed out that these days much work is done on trains, particularly by the kind of high-powered executives and professionals likely to use the service (or to be able to afford it).

But underneath that idea is a kind of Einsteinian paradox about speed and time. The logic of high-speed rail (and supersonic air travel) is to try to reduce the time spent travelling to as close to zero as possible. It is an annihilation of time that also works at a psychological level. The faster you go the emptier time becomes. High-speed trains may be convenient – and I like to travel by Eurostar to Paris – but they have a strange effect on your experience of journeys.

And what applies to time also applies to space. As time becomes a nuisance to be traversed as quickly as possible, so does space, all the intricate and lovely detail of landscape that you cannot appreciate at high speed. If all that matters is getting from A to B, the space in between can be sacrificed. Vast prairies or tundras will not suffer too much but the woods and medieval towns of the Chilterns are too precious (in my view, which may be biased) to be put at risk.

In his poem “Ithaka”, the Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy warns against too hasty an approach to travelling; “Do not hurry your journey in the least,” he counsels. “Pray ... that there may be many summer mornings when with what joy, with what delight you will enter harbours you have not seen before.”

harry.eyres@ft.com

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