Question: What are the different types of railway passengers as described by J. B. Priestley?
Answer:
‘Travel by Train’ is a humorous essay by J. B. Priestley in which, he has given his keen observations of various kinds of railway travellers and their eccentricities.
Priestley says that a typical Englishman behaves quite differently at home and in public places. The author says that he has rarely come across a quiet and inoffensive fellow passenger in a railway carriage.
A typical kind of traveller whom he hates, is a large middle-aged woman with a rasping voice. She carries a lot of luggage and there is always a whining puppy with her. She always enters the smoking compartment and occupies seat forcefully. She stares at people with fierce looks.
However, such travellers will how soon be extinct because now there are stronger men in our midst.
There are other types of railway travellers who are harmless but still irritating. They are the ones who carry all their odd things and household utensils with them by packing them up in brown paper parcels of all sizes and shapes.
Then there are the simple folks who are always busy eating and drinking during the entire journey. They talk with their mouths full, scatter crumbs over the trousers of others and peel and eat bananas with such rapidity, that other travellers feel awkward and change the compartment.
Children are not good fellow-travellers either. They always whimper and howl and play different cranks on a cold day, they would insist on opening the windows of the compartment and on a hot summer day, they would not allow the windows to be opened at all.
More to the taste of the author are the innocent travellers who always board the wrong train.
They never bother about checking the time-tables or asking the railway officers. The author wonders if these travellers ever reach their desired destination.
The author, above all, envies the people who can sleep soundly during a train journey and wake up just before their station arrives and walk out refreshed. He calls them mighty sleepers and says that they are like the Seven of Ephesus.
Priestley finds seafaring men, good companions because their talk is entertaining and they get along well with anybody. However, they are not to be found on journeys away from the coastal towns.
The most dreadful fellow traveller according to Priestley is the nearly dressed but tobacco stained
old man who sits in a corner and opens the conversation by saying that the train is three Like Coleridge’s Ancient-Mariner, he will take hold of you and bore you endlessly
with the details of various trains and their timings. It seems, all his life has been spent in trains
and he has read nothing but train time-tables. The author warns us to be at a distance from such a man.
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