Ground transportation hubs have unfortunate things in common.  At least in Western Europe.  Grotty little coffee shops with dry croissants and disgruntled staff.  More people asking you for money than in an African capital’s marketplace.  The same acrid smell of old urine in the communicating tunnels beneath the station.  You could be magically transported from one of these stations to another in a different country and the only clue to the dislocation would be the language of the signs on the walls.

Stations are situated in town centers, generally depressing the property prices around them due to the noisy and ugly rail tracks and traffic they generate, and create such a confluence of foreigners, tourists and travellers that they act as a magnet for organised groups of beggars.  I’ve been going through the Gare du Nord in Paris for 3 years now, and I recognise quite a few of the women in headscarves that hand me little bits of paper with stories of incredible woe on them, written in English, in the hopes that my pity and sympathy will compel me to part with my money.

On the tracks in the stations, however, you will find marvels of modern technology and engineering.  The national train network is one of those things that we take for granted, but which is in fact quite an amazing achievement.  Vast numbers of trains leave these stations every day, to be routed through countless kilometers of tracks and switches so as to arrive, hopefully within a few minutes of an assigned time, at another station.  Populations of people larger than any modern army mobilisation are moved on a daily basis all over the country.  Despite how quick we are to criticise when things go wrong and trains are late and the network doesn’t deliver us to our destination on time, it remains a thing of wonder.

The Thalys – the high-speed train between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – is at the sharp end of fully commercialised train technology.  A 300 kph purple-red, phallically-shaped, air-conditioned container that gets you from Brussels to Paris in 80 minutes.  It costs less than, and takes half as much time as driving a car over alone.  You also get to work, sleep, eat or people-watch instead of getting cut up by aggressive French drivers.  Wi-fi access allows squeezes a few extra euros out of those travellers who can’t handle being un-twitter-able for more than 20 minutes at a time, and power outlets at every seat mean that my tiny Dell Notebook arrives in Paris with a full battery.

I don’t much enjoy the stations on the continent (certain stations in the UK are actually very nice, and don’t share the smells and stains of those in France and Belgium), but the Thalys, the Eurostar and other TGV services in and around Western Europe provide an amazing service.  The regular train service may be crowded and slower than the high-speed trains we prefer, but they too move huge numbers daily.  Even if we only dip our toe in it from time to time, and its nature makes it hard to grasp the size or achievement of its construction when we can only see a bit of it at a time, the national infrastructure we can so easily depend on to move us around is really a thing of wonder.