Nicole Junkermann's Atlas of Summer Stations: Reading Between Trains

Where the journey pauses

Most of travelling is not motion. It is the part before the motion, and the part between one stretch of it and the next. For Nicole Junkermann, that is not dead time to be endured but the most reliable reading window the summer offers, and the reason the atlas has slowly grown a section devoted to stations rather than to the places they connect.

A station asks nothing of you. You cannot leave, because the train is coming; you cannot start anything substantial, because the train is coming. What is left is a bounded, protected hour in which the only reasonable thing to do is read. Almost nowhere else in a day is so honestly empty of alternatives.

In summer the effect sharpens. Journeys get longer, connections get looser, and the margins around them widen. A twenty-minute change becomes fifty because of the season's timetable, and the season hands back an hour nobody planned for.

The rhythm of waiting

Waiting has a shape, and it is worth learning. The first few minutes are restless and no use to anybody. Then something settles, and the reading properly begins, and it runs until roughly ten minutes before departure, when one eye goes back to the board and the page stops going in. The usable middle is shorter than the wait, and knowing that changes what you take out of the bag.

It also means the reading has to be the kind that can be interrupted without resentment. Something you can enter quickly and leave mid-thought, that does not punish you for looking up when an announcement comes. Long, patient books are for the train itself. The platform wants something else.

Across a summer of these, the atlas has narrowed the notes down to what actually makes a station worth reading in:

• A bench with a back to it, facing the board, so you can read without checking over your shoulder.
• Light you do not have to fight: a high window, a shaded end of a platform, or a hall deep enough to escape the afternoon.
• A cooler corner in high summer, which is usually the oldest part of the building rather than the newest.
• A departure board visible from where you are sitting, which is the single thing that lets you stop thinking about the time.
• Enough noise to be anonymous in, and not so much that the sentence has to be read twice.

Reading between trains

The journey itself is a different discipline, and the atlas has covered it before: a long unbroken stretch, a book chosen to last, the logic set out in the reading list for long train journeys. The station is the opposite case. It is short, it is uncertain, and it is punctuated. The two need different pages.

What they share is the reason for doing any of it. A journey taken slowly gives back more than it costs, which is the argument running through notes on travelling slowly, and a station is where slowness stops being a decision and becomes simply the situation. You are not choosing to take your time. There is no train yet.

Nicole Junkermann has come to plan a little of this in: the deliberately loose connection, the earlier arrival than strictly needed, the change made at the larger station rather than the quicker one. It reads as inefficiency and is nothing of the sort, being much the same instinct as the one behind slow travel and good books. An hour bought at a station is an hour that arrives with the reading already done.

An atlas that keeps moving

The stations in this atlas are not the famous ones, or not only. Most are ordinary, and their entries are short: a good bench, a bad hall, a platform that catches the evening. It is a working document rather than a guide, and its only real claim is that the hour it describes exists everywhere and is almost always wasted.

Mid-July is when it gets used hardest, because this is when everyone is going somewhere and the timetable is at its most generous with the gaps. The city notes have their own version of the same idea in the mid-July routes through cities at their quietest hour: find the stretch of the day nobody wants, and discover it was the good one.