A railway line on a map contains waits, goodbyes, and lunches eaten from paper.

A line drawn between two towns is a summary of many thousands of ordinary hours. Inside it are platform waits, sandwiches on knees, people watching someone go and standing there until the train is out of sight. Infrastructure looks like engineering and is mostly lived experience laid end to end. Anything drawn cleanly has that much untidy life folded into it.

On your next ordinary train ride, look around and count the different reasons people are travelling. It is a good way to remember that the map you pass through is somebody else’s important day.