Daily Dose of English 118
Trains
Daily Dose of English 118
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about trains. Choo choo! Trains, how fun. I don't know if I've talked about this before. I don't think so. It doesn't show up on my episode list, so hopefully not. But we're at the point where I'm kind of starting to forget what I talked about. But anyway. So trains are big vehicle things for transporting a lot of people. I don't really know how else to describe them. They have a bunch of wheels. They have many different cars. Those are the individual parts. And they're actually not only for transporting people. They're also really, really good at transporting stuff. So freight, you might call it, or things. And they have a couple of other parts like an engine is the front of the train and a caboose, which is the back. And I like trains quite a lot. I'm not like a train fanatic. I definitely don't have a ton of hyper interest in trains. I don't learn facts about trains. I don't study them. I would say more of a casual fan of trains. I always liked Lego trains growing up and wooden train sets and things like that. Those are always some of my favorite toys. And I still like how trains look sort of physically. Something that I'd really like to do at some point in the future is like have a model train as part of decoration, because I've seen that in some places where there's a train in part of a room to just add color, even some movement if you can get it to move, but just having cool model trains somewhere, I think is really cool. I just think they look great in a lot of ways. But I also wanna talk a bit about what they're useful for and why I think that they're interesting, because my actual interest is less aesthetic, so less about the looks and more about the usefulness and what they are and what they mean. because trains can be really, really nice for travel and moving around places, either locally within cities or between cities. So, it's not called locally, but whatever it's called. Between cities and theoretically between countries, if you're in a place with countries that are close enough together with a good enough relationship amongst themselves. And then they're also fantastically useful for transporting freight because the biggest thing about trains is how efficient they are. They are so, so efficient with space and energy because their tracks, what they go on, the tracks of the train allow them to be very efficient. They just get to roll along those tracks. You don't have to worry about really anything else and you can make the tracks out of something like steel or other metals to make it even easier to roll, which means there's less friction versus like going on a paved road, which is sort of necessary because on a train you're going just straight. And so you can go faster with less energy necessarily. Or in the case of what trains actually do is just they have a ton of power, but they just carry a bunch of stuff. They bring a lot of passengers, they bring a lot of other cars, trains are usually humongous, and that makes them really, really efficient for transporting people, or stuff, again, like I said. I don't know if you've ever seen a big freight train go by, but they're usually very, very long. It takes several minutes for the entire train to go by, and they're being pulled by just a couple of train cars at the front. I remember having to wait for the train to go by, like the freight train in growing up a couple, many times actually. It's not super common, but there's definitely times where the train is going by and you want to like go. Because they're usually not in the middle of the city, the freight trains aren't. And so they're sort of in the outskirts. But if you want to cross that train track, you kind of got to wait because you can't go through a physical train. It's physical. It's not you're not able to go through it or under it or whatever. And so I remember having to wait for those big long trains. And I used to sort of enjoy counting the cars and seeing them go, especially if they're not blocking you and you can sort of look at them for just a minute and you can just see how many train cars there are. That's just so cool. And now I'm really more interested in them as moving people, right? I don't have to worry about moving freight very often, so it's not a thing that's at the top of my mind. But I definitely think about moving around a lot, because it's something that I do. Yeah, I mean, I move around, so it's nice to think about that. And I'm sadly not really able to take trains very often. There's the metro here in the city, but that doesn't really count. I take that fairly often, but I wouldn't really call that the same thing as like taking a train. You can think of those more like a metro or even streetcars, like my hometown has a streetcar. But again, there are technically trains in a way, but they just don't feel like a train the same way like a big train that goes really fast does. And sadly, there just aren't real good trains to use in pretty much all of North America. There's just, especially like New York, especially, actually New York has some of the better ones in the entire, in all of North America, especially the US and Mexico, which is where I spent the most of my time. There's not good train options. I've tried taking trains in the US on Amtrak, but there's just so many problems. They're so slow, they're always delayed, and they go nowhere, like they go from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere. These are often called park and ride, where you have to drive to the train station because there's no real other way to get there. There is Grand Central in Portland specifically, but that's also not super convenient to get to. It's better, but you're very likely going to drive to a train station anyway, and so it just makes this whole mess. It's just really slow to get there. And then I remember going up to Seattle, which is the closest major city to Portland. It's only a couple hours away, but the train doesn't stop in Seattle. It stops in Tacoma, which is outside of Seattle. So you have to get somebody to come pick you up and bring you to the city anyways. There's not really a way to get into the city unless you have a car, which sort of defeats the purpose of a train. And yeah, there's basically nothing in Mexico. They did open a train in the south of Mexico, but it's really more of a touristy train. It's not really great for moving around day to day if you wanna go to another city. And it's only in a small area. And it's not even that good. They spent a ton of money and opened it, and there's a ton of problems. And so it's just become another one of those not amazing train systems. To be fair, having good trains is a big, big thing. It's very difficult. It takes a lot of money and time and effort, but it absolutely can be done. There's tons of countries around the world with excellent train service, and it is very, very usable, I guess you could say. And that's what I want to, sort of, this is why I wanted to make this video, or this video, this episode, is because I was watching a video today about somebody, I was watching in Czech, for my Czech learning, about sort of using different modes of transport to get from different parts of Europe, because a lot of Europe has pretty good trains, we can say. Some countries are better than others, some are worse. and sort of comparing that to speed with something like taking an airplane or driving. Very often, driving is going to be the fastest option, just because you can go directly from where you want to go to directly where you want to go. But you have to have a car, you have to be able to drive, you have to drive, like you can't just do something else on the train, for example, when you're driving. You have to be there and present and driving. And it can be quite expensive, especially if there's tolls and then gas. If you're just going on your own, it can be pretty expensive. but trains can be often the best option. They're slower than airplanes technically, but with airplanes you have to go to the airport, which is always out of the way, you have to go through security, you have to wait for the airplane, you have to get on, you have to wait for everybody to put their shit on there, then you have to fly, then you have to land, then you have to go back out, then you have to get to the city, and so it ends up being way longer even though the mode of transport is faster. But trains, especially in Europe, go from, like, center of the city to center of the city in a lot of cases, or even to smaller parts of the city. I remember traveling quite a bit actually on trains in Germany and it was pretty good. There was one time that I got stranded because there was nobody else on the train and they're like, we're not going to run this train. But then they called a taxi for me to just take me exactly where I wanted to go. So it actually ended up working out fine. I didn't have to pay anything extra. Instead of having to go to the station then get picked up, I was just driven to exactly where I wanted to go. Yes, it was later than I wanted, but whatever. It's fine. That was many years ago at this point. Anyways, I've kind of blabbed myself into 10 minutes here, but I hope that you enjoyed this episode and maybe learned a little something about trains. Let me know what kind of trains are in your country and if you like them or you dislike them, I'd be curious to know. But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. See you then. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.