A Night Train North

The train left at seven in the evening, in the sort of dark that has already been going for hours. I had a thermos, a window seat, and no plan to sleep.

Departure

You board a night train like you move into a small flat. Boots by the door, coat on the hook, the bunk made up by someone who has done it ten thousand times. Mine was the lower berth, narrow as a bookshelf and warm as bread. A woman in the opposite bed was already asleep with a woollen hat pulled to her eyebrows.

We pulled out past the last of the city lights. For twenty minutes the window showed me my own face. Then the glass cleared and there was snow.

The long middle

Past nine, the villages thinned. A lit kitchen. A single car at a crossing, engine running, waiting with the patience of someone who's waited before. A lake, completely flat, the colour of a pewter plate.

I tried to read and couldn't. The rhythm of the wheels does something to attention. It makes the landscape lean in and ask to be watched. So I watched. At one point a fox crossed the line a long way ahead, small and red against the white, and I felt irrationally lucky about it.

Around midnight the conductor came through with a torch and a quiet word for each of us. Nobody asked for tickets. I think she was checking we were still alive.

A few things I learned

• Pack a second thermos if you can; the buffet shuts early

• Ear plugs help, but not for the reason you'd think. The train is gentle. It's the other passengers' alarms

• Keep your boots where you can reach them

• Bring something to eat that isn't crumbly

• Leave the blind up an inch

Arrival

I slept after all, between two and five, and woke to the lightest grey at the edge of the blind. The woman opposite was awake too, looking out at a hillside the colour of old paper. "Almost there," she said, in the tone of someone saying a short prayer.

Skjellvik station is a single platform and a bench. The cold hit the moment the door opened. Not sharp, exactly, but total, as if the air had changed language. My breath stood in front of me for a second and then hurried off.

A man in a wool coat held a hand-lettered sign with my name misspelled. He'd been waiting forty minutes in the cold, and he wasn't bothered. He took one of my bags and we walked to a van with its engine already warm.

Why the train

I could have flown. It would have been quicker, and I won't pretend there aren't days when I'd choose quick. But a train north does something a plane can't. It lets you feel the distance. You watch the trees shrink, the villages thin, the light change its mind. By the time you arrive, you've been brought there, rather than dropped.

I think about that sleeper more than any other leg of the trip. The cold had a shape by the time I met it. And I'd already said goodbye to the south somewhere around the second lake.