Why I keep writing these on the train

Saturday, half nine, and I was standing under the big board at Zürich HB with a coffee I didn't really need, watching the Hochnebel sit on the city like a lid. Grey to the point of having no shadows. Marc had stayed home with Lotti, who'd decided the weather was a personal insult, and I'd come down to the station with no train to catch. I just wanted to be in the hall for twenty minutes before the shopping. That's roughly where this journal comes from, so I might as well say so.

People who don't live near it imagine the HB must be grand to look at, but it isn't really; the headhouse is handsome enough (1871, the old terminal part), but what I keep coming back to is the noise and the numbers. Something like 2,900 trains move through here on a weekday, and a few hundred thousand people, which makes it the busiest terminus in Europe by traffic. By floor space it's smaller than Leipzig, but by traffic nothing in Europe touches it. You feel it in the great hall, under Niki de Saint Phalle's fat colourful Guardian Angel that hangs up there since '97, looking like it wandered in from a much louder city. It has no business being there and stays anyway. Very Zürich, oder.

I bought the coffee at Caffè Spettacolo (about five francs, hot, gone in four minutes), and on a foggy Saturday it was exactly enough. I stood where I could see the clock. If you've never watched a Hilfiker one properly: the red second hand, shaped like a little signalling disc on a stick, sweeps the full minute and then stops at the top. It pauses there, about a second and a half, before the master signal lets the next minute start. The clock waits on purpose, and then everyone leaves at once.

Most of this runs on the GA, the Generalabonnement, the thing that lets me onto basically any train, tram, boat or postbus in the country without thinking about it. It isn't cheap. Somewhere near 4,000 francs a year, 2nd class, and they re-price it every December, so don't quote me. But once you've paid, distance stops mattering. I'll go to Bern or Chur the way other people go to the far end of their own tram line. Half the trips that ended up in here began as nothing much: a clear forecast and a train to Bern every half hour that gets in under the hour. I keep this journal since two years now, and most of it started exactly like that.

What I actually do most weeks is duller and closer: the S-Bahn, the blue ZVV trains, an S6 or an S12 doing the unromantic work of getting me three stops. I won't pretend I cross the country on an InterCity. Most of my arrivals are small, and I'd started forgetting them: which Perron, what the Bise was doing to my ears on the walk over, the way the Sihl slides out from under the station to meet the Limmat just past Platzspitz.

It started as a list of arrival times and which side the valley was on. It's mostly still that, if I'm honest.

So that's the why. The big trips remember themselves; the small Saturdays don't, and a run of them just disappears otherwise, and I'd rather it didn't. I checked the next S-Bahn home before I left: four minutes, Perron 43.

I finished the coffee. The clock did its pause. I went and bought bread.

— Tobi