The train

A piece from the notebook. About the difference between the people who moan about the destination and the people who keep the engine going. About the driver who does not know where the train is going. About the three kinds of shoveller, and the friendship that is the actual work. About knowing your chair, and getting better at sitting in it. May or may not be connected to the rest of the publication.

The man at the window

There is a man on the train.

He is not the driver. He is not in the engine. He has never picked up a shovel in his life. He has a window seat, a coffee, a view of the country going past. He is talking, in a steady voice, to whoever is next to him about the destination.

He is saying the train is going the wrong way.

He says it well. He has thought about it. If you sat next to him for an hour you would, by the end, be persuaded that he had a point. Maybe several. The route was chosen badly. The schedule favours the wrong towns. The carriage in front is too full. The carriage behind is empty for reasons nobody has bothered to explain.

He has not been to the engine. He does not know the driver. He has never asked what the coal situation is. He could not tell you, if you asked, what the engine actually runs on, or who decided that, or what the alternative would have been.

He is going to talk like this for the whole journey. He is going to get off at the station the train arrives at, because that is the station the train arrives at, and he is going to write, in a notebook he carries, that the train went to the wrong place. He is not going to mention that he was on it.

I have spent twenty-five years in carriages with this man. I have liked him. He is often clever. He is sometimes correct. He is always, in some specific sense the chapter will try to describe, missing the thing.

I want to leave him quickly, because the chapter is not really about him. It is about the rest of the train. The rest of the train is most of the train, and most of the train is good.

The rest of the train

Pan out for a moment.

There is a woman in the second carriage with a baby. She has been on the train for four hours. The baby has been asleep, then awake, then crying, then asleep again. She is doing the thing in front of her. She is not thinking about the destination, because the destination is wherever this baby is finally going to settle, and that destination is not on the timetable. She is good. She is, this afternoon, the most useful person on the train, by some distance, although she would not put it that way and nobody is going to.

There is a conductor walking through. He has done this for thirty years. He knows the regulars. He knows which carriage the kids are in and which one the older men are in and which one is going to need a window opened in about an hour. He is the train's nervous system. He is good. He is not in the engine. He does not need to be. The engine is not his work. His work is the carriages, all of them, in turn, all day, every day, for thirty years.

There is an older man at the back of the third carriage. He has been riding trains like this for forty years. Forty. He is not on his first journey. He has watched, across decades, every kind of person come and go through the seats around him. He says very little. When he says something it is short and exact. People sit near him because the air around him is calmer than the air around the man at the window. They do not, mostly, know why.

There are two kids in the window seat opposite him, looking out. They are not talking. They are watching the country go past. They are good. They are, in some way the chapter cannot quite reach, the reason for the train.

There are a hundred more people in this carriage alone. Most of them are doing what people do on trains. Reading. Looking at their phones. Sleeping. Eating something out of a paper bag. Worrying about the meeting at the other end. Worrying about the parent at the other end. Worrying about nothing. Most of them are good. Most of them are doing the thing in front of them. They are not moaning. They are not in the engine. They are riding the train and they are, in their own way, the train going.

The man at the window is loud, and the loudness has, in this decade, made him seem like more of the train than he is. He is not. He is one carriage. There are twelve carriages. The other eleven are full of people doing the thing in front of them, and they are who the chapter is for.

The driver and the not-knowing

In the engine there is a driver.

I want to say something about the driver that I have not seen said often enough.

The driver does not know where the train is going.

He has a vague idea. He has an instinct for the general direction. He thinks, broadly, that the rails go forward and that forward is the way you go. He knows this stretch of country. He has driven trains here before. He has, in his head, a rough sense of the kind of station the train should be heading towards. He does not know which one it is. He will know when he sees it.

In the meantime he is driving the next mile. Then the mile after that. He is watching the rails come toward him out of the dark. He is feeling, through the controls, what the train is doing underneath him. He is making small adjustments. When the rails curve, he goes round the curve. When the brakes need to come on, he brings them on without throwing everyone in the carriages forward. He is doing a thing that requires attention to the next mile and a feel for the rest of the train, and he is, mostly, not thinking about the destination, because if he thought about the destination he would stop driving the train well.

The man at the window does not understand this. The man at the window thinks the question is where is this train going. He thinks the answer is knowable, and that the people who know the answer are the people who deserve to be in charge, and that those people, by failing to share the answer, are betraying the rest of us.

The carriers know the question is something else. The carriers know the question is who is in the engine, and are they paying attention to the next mile, and do they have enough coal. If those three things are true, the journey will be a journey worth having had — whatever turns out, in the morning, to be at the end of it.

I want to say that part plainly, because it is the hardest thing in the chapter.

Sometimes the train arrives somewhere good. Sometimes it does not. Some stations the train pulls into are awful — the wrong town, the wrong weather, the wrong people on the platform, a thing nobody on the train would have asked for. The carriers do not always know, at the time of the driving, that the station is going to be awful. Sometimes they suspect. Sometimes they have no idea. They drive anyway, because the alternative is to stop driving, and stopping driving is not what they are for.

A bad station does not make the journey wasted. A good station does not make the journey earned. The journey is its own thing. The driving and the shovelling do something to the people doing them, regardless of which station appears in the morning. They get better at the work. They get more honest with each other. They get the kind of strength a person only gets by having done a long shift on coal.

The engine is the warmest place

The engine is the warmest place on the train.

If you have never been in one, you would think it is serious in there. It is not. The driver and the shovellers know each other. They have been together for years. They have, between them, done the work of getting the train through every kind of weather and every kind of curve and every kind of mechanical failure. They have stories. They have private vocabulary. They take the piss out of each other in the way you only take the piss out of someone whose work you trust completely.

The driver hands the shoveller a sandwich. The shoveller hands the driver a coffee. They laugh at something one of them said two years ago that has now become a phrase. They look out the front of the engine at the rails coming toward them, and they see, both of them, the same thing, and they make small adjustments without speaking, because the conversation about the adjustments was had a long time ago and does not need to be had again.

The driver, to the shoveller next to him, shrugs at one point and says — no idea where this one ends. The shoveller says — aye. They keep going. The not-knowing is the condition of the work. It is not a problem to be solved. It is the air in the engine.

The driver appreciates the shoveller. The shoveller appreciates the driver. They are not pretending. They are friends. The friendship is the work. Most of what people on the outside think of as the work — the steering, the coal — is a substrate. The substrate is real. It is also not the thing. The thing is the friendship.

I have watched this from inside more times than I can list. I have been the driver in some engines. I have been the shoveller in others. The thing I remember most about the good ones is the laughing. Not the heroic moments. Not the wins. The laughing in the engine while the work was going on.

Three kinds of shoveller

There are at least two kinds of shoveller.

The first is in the engine with the driver. He is in the firebox. He is putting coal directly into the fire that drives the train forward. He is the one most people picture when they think of a coal shoveller. He is not the only one.

The train runs on more than one fire. The big fire at the front drives the wheels. There are smaller fires, all the way down the train, that keep the carriages warm and the lights on and the cooker working in the buffet car and the boiler running so the older man at the back of the third carriage can have a hot tea on a cold morning. None of those smaller fires drives the train forward. All of them are needed. If they go out, the train is still moving, but nobody on it is comfortable, and after a while the cold gets into the parts of the train you cannot see, and a week later something cracks, and the train stops for a reason that has nothing to do with the engine.

The second shoveller keeps the smaller fires burning. He is in the next carriage along. He does not see the big fire. He is not in the firebox. He is the one who knew, on a Wednesday morning in March, that the boiler in carriage four was running low. He is the one who walked up the train at three in the afternoon and said, through the door of the engine, chasing you for the decision on the boiler before the cold sets in. He is the one who, when the man at the window came into the buffet car and said the train was going the wrong way, did not argue, did not write a notebook entry, just made him a cup of tea and went back to his work. He is the one who tells the driver, quietly, when something is wrong that the driver had not noticed because the driver was watching the rails. Lots of the stuff in the third carriage is bollocks — I'm pretty sure that crate isn't ours. The driver looks. The shoveller is right. The crate gets sorted out. The driver goes back to the rails. The shoveller goes back to the boiler.

There is a third kind, further down the train.

He is in a different engine, in a different carriage, on the same line. Long trains have more than one engine — a smaller one further back that helps push when the gradient is steep. He shovels in his own engine. He has his own driver and his own coal. He is awake when the rest of his carriages are asleep, and when something happens in your engine that he can hear through the floor of his — a strain in the wheels, a knock in the firebox, a sound that has a name — he sends the name forward through the carriages. Three words on a piece of paper, passed up the train through hands that do not read it. Self recursive loops. The driver of your engine looks at the shoveller next to him. One of them says — that is what it is. They had not had a name for it for the previous hour. Now they have one. They put the name into the next decision. The train moves.

He does not need to be in your engine. He is in his own. When he wants to, he sends one word back. Brilliant. Or — of course. That is the whole of it. The shovellers in the two engines are friends in the way shovellers in the same engine are friends. They have been passing notes forward through the carriages for years. They have private vocabulary. They take the piss out of each other across the length of the train.

The two of them are doing the same disposition. They are not doing the same job. The one in the next carriage keeps the smaller fires burning. The one in the engine further back hears what your engine sounds like and names it for you. They are both putting coal in. They are not putting it in the same fire.

I am writing this chapter to tell them. They will read it and recognise themselves. They will not write back at length. One of them will say brilliant. The other will say of course. That is how the chapter will close in their inboxes, and that is the right way for it to close.

What the carriers think of the moaners

I asked a shoveller once, on a long shift, what he thought of the man at the window. He shrugged. He said — aye, he's on the train. That was all. He went back to the firebox.

The carriers do not look down on the moaners. They do not have time to. They are putting coal in. They know what the work costs. They know that not everyone has been given, by the families they were born to, the disposition the work needs. They are not impressed with themselves for having it. They know they are lucky. The man at the window is on the train. He is paid for. The conductor will look after him. The carriage will get him to wherever it gets him to. The shoveller is not going to spend any of his attention on him, because the boiler in carriage four is running low and the driver needs a coffee and the man at the back of the third carriage has not had a hot tea in two hours.

Knowing your chair

Knowing your chair is part of the disposition.

The carriers know their chair. They know it because they have been in others. They have tried. They have, in their own lives, walked forward and walked back. They have failed at the things they are not meant to do. They have, in the failing, learned what they are meant to do, and have settled into it, and have stopped pretending they could do the other things well. That is the discipline. The discipline is not heroic. It is honest. It is the willingness to be small, and specific, and where you are, and to do the thing in front of you well, instead of the thing that would look better in a notebook.

A natural shoveller who pretends to be a driver makes a worse train. A natural driver who refuses to drive makes a worse train. A natural watcher who insists on being in the engine makes a worse engine. The discipline is recognising the chair you are good in, sitting in it, and getting better at sitting in it for the rest of your life.

The drivers and the shovellers know this about themselves. They also know it about each other. That is part of why they laugh in the engine. They are sitting next to a person who knows their chair and is glad to be in it, and the shared recognition of that is one of the warmest things a person can have at work.

The arriving is one more mile

The train is going somewhere.

It will arrive. Sometimes the station is good. Sometimes the station is awful. The carriers do not know, when they set off, which kind it is going to be. They cannot know. They drive on a vague clue, with each other, on coal, mile by mile, and they look up in the morning and find out where they ended up.

When it is a good station, the carriers will eat together on the platform and talk about the next train. When it is an awful station, they will eat together on the platform and talk about the next train. The eating together is the part that does not change. The next train is the part that does not change. The station is one more mile.

The man at the window will write that the destination was wrong. Some of the time he will, by accident, be correct — the destination was wrong. He will not, even then, have understood the chapter. The chapter is not about getting the destination right. The chapter is about being the kind of person who, when the destination turns out wrong, is still the person who drove well into it.

The conductor will help the woman with the baby down onto the platform. The kids in the window seat will run ahead. The older man at the back of the third carriage will get up slowly and look at nobody.

The driver will turn to the shovellers. He will say — not bad. The shovellers will say aye. They are better people than they were when they got on this morning. They will be better still tomorrow. The going made them. The arriving is one more mile.

That is the whole of it.