Written by: Mahir Daiyan Ashraf
Four hours used to feel far.
Back home, a four-hour trip meant something serious. In Dhaka it could mean traffic, planning, being stuck in a car long enough to traverse half the country. In Atlanta it usually meant a road trip, gas stops, maybe a Buc-ee’s if you were lucky. The distance felt heavy and you had to commit to it being a grand trip.
Then I came to Georgia Tech-Europe and got a Eurail pass.
Suddenly four hours became “Oh, it’s just one train.”
My semester here has been stitched together by platforms and departure boards. When I think back on these months, I know I’ll remember the bigger moments in Prague or Florence, but I have a feeling the quieter memories in between cities will sneak up on me just as often. The hours in motion. The time when you are not really anywhere, just floating through a corridor of tracks.
It starts on the platform.
There is a particular kind of early-morning cold that exists at train stations. You are half awake, wrapped in a hoodie you regret not washing, backpack heavier than you remember packing it, suitcase wheels rattling over uneven tiles. The sky is still a dark blue, the station lights are yellow. Someone is clutching a coffee, someone else is already eating a suspiciously early croissant. Your friends huddle in a circle around one phone, double-checking that this is, in fact, the right train.
The first weekend I did a “long” trip, anything over two hours sounded daunting. I checked the Eurail app every five minutes. What if the connection was too short? What if the platform changed at the last second? What if we got on the wrong half of a split train and ended up in a different country? My sense of distance was still in car mode. Trains felt like magic, but also like they might betray me.
Then came the really long ones.
On the fourteen-hour overnight ride to Prague, time stopped behaving in a normal way. The train left one city in daylight and arrived in another with a completely different language and architecture, and my brain never got a clean transition. We cycled through every possible train activity. Studying. Trying to read. Failing to read. Having snacks that definitely did not qualify as a real meal. Watching dark fields slide past, dotted with tiny clusters of lights.
At some point in the early morning, a few of us woke up dazed and stiff from dozing off in the wrong position. The cabin was quiet except for the hum of the tracks. Outside, there were patches of fog and little toy-like houses. No one said anything for a while. Everyone was half in their own thoughts but still sharing the same experience.
Not every long journey is that cinematic though. Some are just pure survival. In Switzerland, our gondola coming down the mountain broke down, then the train itself broke down, and what was meant to be a light connection of an hour and a half turned into a race against time. We basically launched ourselves out of the carriage and sprinted down the platform so fast that the conductor actually looked alarmed. On paper it was a zero-minute transfer. In reality it was a blur of stairs, backpacks, and the motivation of knowing that missing this train meant sleeping on a bench for the night.
Other nights, we did not even have a bench. In Chiasso, in the middle of the night, we ended up trying to sleep on the floor of a train station when it was four degrees Celsius. With no actual doors separating us from the outside world, the cold cut through every layer we were wearing and settled straight into our spines. The station echoes differently at that hour. Every passing person’s step feels huge. Every announcement feels louder. I remember thinking that this was still technically part of my “study abroad experience” and wondering if future me would ever look back on it fondly. (Right now the answer is still no.)
And that is what trains gave me this semester more than anything else: frames. Pieces of time where life was temporarily narrowed to a window and some tracks and whoever happened to share the row.
Planes never did that for me. Planes are about getting it over with. Cars are about controlling the route. Trains are different. They turn travel into something you inhabit. You are not just going from Metz to somewhere else. You are living through the distance between.
I realized how much my sense of “far” was changing one random weekend when I caught myself saying, “Yeah, it’s just a quick three-hour train.” Three hours. “Quick.” My past self would like a word.
But that is what Europe and its rail network quietly do to you. They shrink the mental map. Cities that once sounded like separate chapters suddenly sit on the same double-page spread. Paris, Madrid, Milan, Prague. In my head they are no longer disconnected points on a globe, but rather stops, transfers. Places where I once sprinted up or down concrete stairs with my backpack bouncing behind me.
Of course, it is not always peaceful. Sometimes “life between platforms” looks like running through a station, scaring everyone around you because your first train was late by eight cursed minutes. It looks like frantically scanning departure boards in a language you do not speak, trying to decode which “Verspätung” is going to ruin your carefully planned itinerary. It looks like hauling your backpack down a platform that seems to go on forever, past thirty calm people who absolutely know where they are going, while you definitely do not.
Sometimes it looks like other people’s disasters too. Friends who sleep through their stop near Munich and do not realize until they are well past where they were supposed to get off. Friends who hop off at what they think is their stop and end up stranded in Strasbourg with no trains back. Friends who took an early-morning train in such a daze that they forgot their suitcase, which is probably still commuting Metz–Luxembourg somewhere out there.
But even those chaotic moments have their own kind of adrenaline memory. The relief when you fall into your seat and the doors close behind you. The way your group dissolves into a communal sigh of relief once the train actually starts moving.
And then there are the returns to Metz.
Late at night, on the last connection home. The carriage is dimmer and quieter. Everyone tired but our minds still replaying the weekend in fragments. A cathedral here. A wrong tram there. A plate of something you cannot pronounce. People scroll through photos, send updates to family, or just stare out into their own reflection in the window.
You pass through small towns lit by a handful of streetlights and think about how many versions of “home” you have now. Bangladesh. Atlanta. Metz for this brief chapter. The train is literally moving you from one to another, but there is a part of you that feels strangely stationary, like you are watching your own life slide by outside.
That is what I will miss when this semester ends. Not just the convenient access to a dozen countries or the ability to say “We could do a day trip there.” I will miss the in-between part. The platform adventures.
When I go back to a world of highways and airport security lines, I think some part of my brain will still be tuned to the rhythm of European trains. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there will always be a departure board flipping to a new city and a voice saying, almost casually,
“It’s just one train away.”
