Trains on the brain

It seems I’ve been in this train-obsessed phase as of late. It may have started with a short film that I watched in my very first screenwriting class (yes, I’m taking a class! More on which later). is set on a late-night train (in what looks like Paris) and I liked it a lot (so clicky the linky!).

For reasons that are apparent if you’ve seen the film, it stayed with me. So for my first screenwriting assignment, one of my three short drafts was set on a train. Following the age-old advice to “write what you know,” I wrote about a routine (commuting by train) and nestled it in a memory (the Paris metro). It went over quite well, and it’s going to metamorphose into a short screenplay over the next two weeks.

My final assignment for photography class was due the same week. I was cramming, with just one afternoon before the class to shoot a series of photos on a single theme. It was a debilitatingly hot day, I had zero ideas for themes or subjects, and all I wanted was to stay indoors. I thought I would just hop on the train, wait for ideas to come to me and get off wherever something fired up my wilting imagination.

Then it hit me. I didn’t even have to leave the train station!

Thanks to my sister, who sent me this great article on the best places to practice motion blur shots, I achieved my two-pronged aim of completing my photography assignment AND beating the heat!

A reversal: still train, moving people. By the way, all these long exposures were taken with no tripod. My teacher was amazed and said I must have an iron grip.

Finally I stepped off the platform and into the train… where I was lucky to sit right across from this adorable little girl. Who by the way was both eating and drinking in the train.

Then I transferred to the green line and off at Kallang station, because I remembered that I had been there once before and found it very striking.

Motion blur is fun! Wheee!

And THEN I realized I had always been curious about the old railway station at Tanjong Pagar. It’s a train that actually takes you all the way to Malaysia. Built in the 1930s, the station stands on property that’s recently been turned over to Malaysia by the Singapore government.

Diba, parang Grand Central lang? My thought bubble upon seeing the station for the first time was: Meron palang ganito sa Singapore? I was really sorry I didn’t have a wider lens to capture the whole interior. There were many, more accomplished (or at least better-invested) shutterbugs there the same afternoon with bigger lenses than mine.

The mood seemed a lot more slow and sleepy than any of the other train stations I normally pass through.

But no matter how many things change, I guess there will always be someone rushing to catch the train.