Travel activities for adults: The Train

The time we spend traveling from one place to the next is unavoidable and from childhood we are taught to fill this dead-time with some sort of activity. Here are two examples of websites dedicated to this:

Travel Games for Families and Kids
"Experienced traveling parents know to pack a bag of toys and activities for kids for car trips and air travel boredom. The trick is to keep the bag's contents a surprise! Then, pull out a new activity or surprise along the way to prevent whining and boredom."
http://childparenting.about.com/od/familytravel/a/travelgames.htm

Travel Activities for Children Ages 6-10
"These fun activities for children are perfect for traveling, or for passing the time in waiting rooms or on bad-weather days."
This site is interesting as it has a whole separate category for 'Waiting Activities'
http://fun.familyeducation.com/travel/family-travel/33401.html

Every workday I commute, by train, between Woking and London. At the stations, I am offered three different, free newspapers to ensure that I do not become bored and badly behaved.

So, I suppose this brings me to the first on-train activity: 'Reading the newspaper'. I will try now to give you a semi-exhaustive list of the things that I have seen people do on the train.

• Reading newspapers and storybooks.
• Check emails (lap-top; Blackberry) and text messages
• Phone work-colleagues (morning travel - usually to explain why late*), spouse (evening travel - usually to explain why late*) and friends (the absolutely most interesting conversations to overhear!).
• Doing puzzles (most commonly wordsearches, Sudoku or crosswords)
• Sleeping (one of my work colleagues tells me that on her morning train about 85 % of the people just sit down and shut their eyes!)
• Listening to music? on iPods or mp3 players
• Eating, buying food from the refreshment trolley, entering and exiting the toilets.
• Applying make-up (only seen this once, and the lady was putting on !silver! mascara)
• Reading/scribbling on work-related papers
• Drawing cartoons (only seen this once)
• Taking down shorthand notes in a shorthand book while listening to a tape-recorder with headphones (only seen once, male, surreal)
• Taking photographs out of the window (rarely seen on the commute, but frequently seen on weekend excursions)
• Watching DVDs (on the home-journey - incidentally watched my first and only 'Buffy' episode over someone shoulder one evening when I could not get a seat)
• Playing computer games
• Chatting
• Changing shoes
• Cleaning out pockets or handbag (okay, this is something that I do - never actually seen anyone else doing it...)
• Just sitting

*Interesting in that these are the only times in my everyday-life that I ever hear people saying things that I know are untrue.