Encounters in Motion: Being Present with Others in Long Duration Train Travel

This paper presents some auto-ethnographic experiments in the embodied, affective and material encounters enabled by being in transit over land for longer than 24 hours. As a form of travel that is increasingly available in some places and increasing marginal elsewhere, long-distance overland travel offers a different perspective to passengering. Like others who have investigated shared spaces of transit like commuter trains and aeromobilites, this paper explores what happens when people are stuck together, moving with each other while simultaneously skimming along a surface. Taking these as sites of encounter—where bodies, technologies and social and material infrastructures are coming into contact with each other, while shaped by human circadian needs—I explore how interactions and encounters are enabled by the persistent co-presence of being trapped together over long-distances of transit. In particular, I focus on how different forms of shared proximities and distances manifest through both interactions and civil inattention that occur between both passengers inside and the passing world outside.