Every country has a train that exists for the people who live along it, and those are the only trains I really want to know about.

This short documentary follows Qinling Train No. 6063, a slow service that has run for decades through the mountains in China. I watched it twice in one evening and then looked up the timetable of my own local line, which I had never once done on purpose.

The line behind my house

Ours has four carriages and a conductor who knows who is getting off where. On market days it smells of onions. On Sunday evenings it carries students with enormous bags back to the city, and a man with a cello who has never, as far as I know, played it on board.

I rode it end to end last month for no reason. It took two hours and forty minutes and cost less than a sandwich. I got off at the far terminus, looked at the sea, had a sandwich after all and came home.

Nobody writes songs about the 09:14 to the junction, but it is the one that gets everyone to the dentist.

What a slow line is for

It is easy to be sentimental about these trains from the comfort of a sofa. For the people on board they are simply how you get to school or sell your vegetables, and that is the point. A service like that is not a view. It is a neighbourhood that happens to move.

I now buy a return on it about once a month. Partly to look out of the window, and partly because I have started to think that the lines we want to keep are the lines we actually use.

Video: CGTN on YouTube. Embedded here, not made by me.

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