Exceptional Foreign Students Share Perspectives on Train Travel

This year’s Millennial Trains Project (MTP) — whose inspiration comes from founder Patrick Dowd’s experience with a similar train journey of purpose for Millennials as a Fulbright scholar in India — is fortunate to have on board five Fulbright scholars representing five different countries, each of whom is a student at a US university who is traveling across America for the first time to pursue a self-guided project, as are the 25 American participants. The Fulbright program, a highly competitive merit-based grant program for foreign exchange students founded by US Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946 and administered by the US Department of State, is covering the cost of these five students’ journeys through a grant to MTP, a nonprofit organization. 

I took the opportunity to speak to each of these five luminaries about their experiences with train travel in their home countries, the role of trains in their country’s culture and popular life, and to hear their thoughts on the experience of seeing the US by train. Each one expressed that the MTP journey has given them a chance to get to know the US up-close and witness the breadth of its landscapes. Here is some of what each student said:

Anser Shaukat, from Karachi, Pakistan, studying painting and printmaking at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth:

The railroad was historically the most efficient way to move people and goods between India and Pakistan until the countries were divided. A dark history surrounds these tracks as many lives were lost on both sides with tensions rising before partition, and trains no longer cross the border. Culturally, Shaukat says, trains were a lot more relevant in the 1980s, when many popular TV shows were set on trains, and he remembers his parents and grandparents telling stories about trains. 

Today, Pakistanis mainly use trains to get between smaller villages and large cities, and to connect between large cities. For many, the train is symbolic of the journey back to one’s home village to reconnect with family. The trip on the country’s main trunk line from Karachi to Islamabad takes 24 hours. All the sleeping cars have double and quadruple-bed rooms, all on the same side of the train, with the aisle on the other side. 

Shaukat, whose family is fairly well-to-do, said he would not ride a Pakistani train if it weren’t for the sleeper service, but that his family would have chosen to fly prior to newer cars being put into service on the Karachi-Islamabad route. The sleepers have their own tables with good food available for purchase from carts pushed down the aisles, so there is no need to access the diner. He says all Pakistani railroads are government-owned with no private investment, and that government spending on rail is not a controversial matter. Nevertheless, the trains have a reputation for not being punctual, and accidents happen every so often, so driving is slightly more in favor nowadays.

Silvia Tijo, from Bogota, Colombia, studying engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology:

The only passenger train currently operating in Colombia is the Tren de la Savana, a 2-hour tourist ride from Bogota, the capital, to Zipaquira. It only runs on weekends, and features live music on board. Tijo has never ridden it, but some of her friends have. Close to the coast, where the terrain is flat, there used to be passenger trains that disappeared before 1950, but railroads were never built into Colombia’s mountainous interior. Plans to build more railroads stopped in the 1930s. Today, most railroads (all of which are privately owned after the national railway, established in 1954 to unify all the lines, was broken up in 1991) are used to carry coal from mines to ports and power plants. All railroads use the Spanish broad gauge, a consequence of Spain building Colombia’s first railroads while it was a colony.

Tijo shared some of the appearances of trains in Colombian culture, including that a common aphorism when something happens too late in one’s live, it is said that “the train left you.” She also remembers a traditional song from the coast whose lyrics are translated “Santa Marta has a train but doesn’t have the track. If it weren’t for the ocean waves, Santa Marta would die.”

Ammar Mohammed, from Yemen, studying social work at the School for International Training Graduate Institute in Vermont:

Yemen has no passenger trains. Most Yemenis drive or use motorbikes, but there are also boats (mostly for recreational activities) and a good bus system, and also private taxis. 

“I have ridden Amtrak trains (mainly the Vermonter), but never experienced anything like this (the Empire Builder route seen from a dome car),” Mohammed says. He has never ridden trains in other countries besides the US. Since much of US industrial development took place because of railroads, “it has a history of its own.” “I see a great potential to connect [Yemen] with railroads. [I want to do] an MTP experience once we have a train in Yemen.” There are no active proposals to build a railroad in Yemen as the country is in a transitional period where the government is focused on stabilizing the security situation. But Mohammed, who envisions a career in local politics, says he wants to be involved in promoting the construction of railroads in Yemen as a public official.

Alyas Widita, from Jogjakarta, Java Island, Indonesia, studying urban development and planning at the University of Iowa:

Widita shared with me a map of Java’s railroad network, consisting of two trunk lines (a northern and southern route), with three branch lines to other coastal points. The most traveled segment, he says, is between his hometown of Jogjakarta and the capital, Jakarta, which he has ridden several times. Widita says the railroads are the most popular way to get between cities as flights are not affordable and buses are not considered safe. The railroads are inherited from what the Dutch, the colonial power, forced the Indonesians to build. 

Widita says the government is not aggressively developing intercity trains, which are diesel powered, compared to commuter trains between Jakarta and its suburbs, which are electrically powered EMUs. Still, there is hourly service throughout the day on the main intercity lines. The Jakarta-Jogjakarta trip is eight hours, and three classes of service are offered: Executive, Business and Economy. 

Ekaterina (Katie) Nikolaeva, from Moscow, Russia, studying economics at Brandeis University:

Nikolaeva’s grandparents worked in a factory that built railroad cars in her birth city of Tver. The longest trip Nikolaeva ever took in Russia was a 36-hour ride from Moscow to the Black Sea beach resort of Anapa, in her childhood. Her family wouldn’t have even considered driving because of the traffic congestion in the Black Sea resort areas. She also has visited France several times and has ridden the TGV and commuter services there more often than she has Russian trains. It struck her that American passenger trains are so often delayed, whereas France’s SNCF (national railway) would compensate passengers automatically if a train were over an hour late. 

Nikolaeva believes that Russia is more broadly covered by passenger trains than the US — both large countries in terms of land area with a similar history of railroads enabling interior development — because traffic on the roads is so bad and train fare is more affordable than gasoline. Especially in the resort areas: Sochi, host of this year’s winter olympics, is beset by traffic jams lasting up to 12 hours. She noted that the introduction of the Sapsan high-speed train between Moscow and St. Petersburg, which uses the same tracks as conventional trains, resulted in the cancellation of many local trains as the Sapsan eats up more track capacity. This is similar to the recent European experience of more affordable, but slower, conventional trains that made more stops being reduced or eliminated on routes that parallel new high-speed lines.