The Case for Taking the Slow Train

For years, my instinct when planning a trip was to search flights first, everything else second. Faster meant better. It took a canceled connection and an unplanned overnight train through the mountains to make me question that math.

What I found, somewhere around hour eleven, wasn't just scenery — though there was plenty of that. It was the strange relief of having nothing to optimize. No gate to sprint to, no security line to calculate against. Just a window, a changing landscape, and a lot of unscheduled time.

The timetable as a feature, not a flaw

Slow travel forces a different kind of planning. You can't cram five cities into four days on a train the way you can (badly) on a budget airline. So you stop trying to. The itinerary shrinks, and the trip gets deeper instead of wider.

"I didn't see more places. I saw fewer places, for longer, and remembered almost all of it."

There's also something to be said for watching a place arrive gradually — city outskirts, then suburbs, then the center — instead of teleporting into an airport thirty minutes from downtown, disoriented and jet-lagged.

What actually changed

I now build trips around a rough number of travel hours I'm willing to enjoy, not just tolerate. Sometimes that's still a flight. But increasingly, it's a train I look forward to almost as much as the destination — which was never something I could say about a boarding gate.