Lose yourself in the hypnotic allure of YouTube’s ‘cab ride’ train-travel videos
By Mark Jenkins,
Vincent Hartogsveld Cabview Holland
A warning chime sounds, the doors whoosh shut, and the train begins to glide into the landscape. It’s a moment of gentle exhilaration that rail riders around the globe have been missing for more than a year. Perhaps that is why there has been a spike in the viewership of long-duration “cab-ride” videos — named for the compartment in which the train operator, or engineer, sits. There are more than 8,000 of these videos on YouTube.
A typical video documents a complete, uninterrupted rail journey as seen from the front of the train. The videos can run 20 minutes or two hours or much, much longer. The soundtrack is usually just clickety-clack ambient sound; some videos supplement the images with a map or on-screen titles that provide information about the route and its landmarks.
YouTube’s corporate parent, Google, may have charted the world with its Maps service, but surveying the vast, ever-changing terrain of its own video-sharing platform is a more complicated task. An inquiry to YouTube’s office of creator and consumer communications yielded no data on the number or popularity of such videos, or about which is the longest. (Perhaps it’s the real-time video of a six-day Trans-Siberian Railway passage, once posted on Russian YouTube but not viewable in the United States.)
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While it doesn’t offer a complete list, the best online guide is railcabrides.com, a Dutch website that lists 8,030 videos that would run 256 days if watched nonstop. Western Europe and East Asia dominate the lineup, and Switzerland and Japan are especially well represented. Those countries enjoy two of the world’s most extensive rail networks, as well as stunning mountain vistas — although Japan’s trains tend to burrow under rather than meander through peaks.
I emailed 10 people who make or catalogue cab-ride videos. Of the six who responded, three are train operators (two from Switzerland and one from the Netherlands). The others are rail buffs, one from Britain and two from Japan, where many standard trains allow passengers at the front of the train the same vantage as the driver. (This isn’t true of the high-speed Shinkansen, which partly explains why there are no cab-view Shinkansen videos on YouTube.)
Paolo
A screenshot of a view near Langwies, in the mountainous canton of the Grisons in eastern Switzerland, from the cab cam on a Rhaetian Railway Arosa Line train in February. At the right is the Langwieser Viaduct, which opened in 1914.
All of the video makers except globe-trotting Briton Tim Hitchcock (whose screen name is Timsvideochannel1) reported significantly increased viewership over the past year, although some of them didn’t credit that entirely to the pandemic. Japan’s Atsushi Yokoi, known on YouTube as Ayokoi, saw his daily views grow from an average of a fewer than 1,000 to a peak of almost 6,000 during the state of emergency in his country from April 7 to May 25, 2020. Views jumped from 2.1 million in 2019 to 6.7 million in 2020 for Hayato Ida, whose videos are mostly of Japan although his channel is AUNZ Railfan, reflecting the countries depicted in his earliest videos.
The bump was also dramatic for a Switzerland-based video maker and train operator who asked to be identified only by his screen name, Lorirocks777, to protect his privacy and because he does not want to be contacted on social media. Views increased to 16.7 million from 4.7 million the previous year, and hours watched rose to 4.1 million from 1.1 million, he reported. Both Lorirocks777 and Vincent Hartogsveld, a Dutch train driver whose channel is Cabview Holland, attributed the large increase in part to the fact that they were posting videos with more impressive scenery or higher picture quality.
Exactly how, where and when the full-trip cab-ride video trend began is unclear. But one of the genre’s foundational documents is a nearly eight-hour “minute by minute” scenic train journey broadcast in 2009 by NRK, a TV network owned by the Norwegian government. NRK’s train programs are not strictly cab-ride videos, since they employ multiple cameras, as one of the show’s producers, Thomas Hellum, noted in an email. But they can be just as captivating.
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In a 2014 TED talk, Hellum recalled reading on social media about a reaction he particularly liked: A man “watched all the program, and at the end station, he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage, and his head hit the curtain rod, and he realized he is in his own living room.”
NRK, which became known as a pioneer of “slow TV,” later produced a set of four videos — one depicting each season — of the 10-hour rail journey from Trondheim to Bodo, above the Arctic Circle. But while Norwegian slow TV began with trains, it soon went off the rails, expanding to such leisurely programming as knitting, reindeer herding and a 134-hour ship voyage. English-language commentators on slow TV often compare it to such static 1960s Andy Warhol films as the five-hour “Sleep” (a man sleeps) and the eight-hour “Empire” (the Empire State Building stands). Yet, there are crucial differences.
In the celluloid era, lengthy sequences with no apparent edits had to be faked by stitching together short takes; digital-video shots can last as long as there is space in the camera’s memory. Also, trains move. Indeed, the rail journey is one of cinema’s very first subjects, dating to the Lumière Brothers’ 1895 “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.” (It’s available on YouTube, of course.) Another link between trains and movies is that before the invention of handheld cameras, heavy photographic rigs were placed on rails to achieve smooth “tracking” shots.
A few cab-ride videos appeal to those who prefer movies to railroads. The4½ -hour video of the West Highland run from Glasgow to Mallaig in Scotland traverses the Glenfinnan Viaduct, a location in Harry Potter movies. But most full-trip train videos are made by and for rail enthusiasts, or trainspotters, as they are known in Britain.
Aunz Railfan
A screenshot of a video from the cab cam of Nagaragawa Railway’s sightseeing train Nagara, going from Mino-Ota to Hokuno in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture.
Viewers “imagine themselves driving a train and feeling the responsibility of doing that,” suggested a train operator who asked to be identified by just his first name, Paolo, echoing Lorirocks777’s privacy concerns. He works for the Rhaetian Railway, whose narrow-gauge lines in southeastern Switzerland are considered among the world’s most scenic.
Paolo’s 2020 video of a run through the snowy Bernina Pass, edited and posted by Lorirocks777, has attracted 5.5 million views in nine months. Cab-ride-video fans who comment on YouTube say they like to watch trips they have made, hope to make or probably never will. Several of the video makers noted that a large part of their audience is older. Most of his viewers are over 65, Hitchcock wrote: “The comments can be very moving, with people recounting memories from anything up to 75 years ago, when things were very different.”
Some of the available videos document journeys on multitrack, mainline straightaways, which cleave a wide swath through the land. Videos of trips on narrow-gauge, single-track lines are far more immersive, because the trains chug so close to their surroundings that they nearly become one with the landscape. This is breathtakingly true of the Rhaetian Railway trips and also of twisting journeys on such narrow-gauge heritage lines as Wales’s Ffestiniog Railway (700,000 views on Timsvideochannel1).
A different sort of intimacy is achieved by the light-rail trains that snake through older sections of Japanese cities, slinking past houses and sometimes swerving among cars on shared streets. These lines include such beloved ones as the Enoden from Kamakura to Fujisawa (Yokoi’s video has been watched 480,000 times) or the Randen from downtown Kyoto to Arashiyama (my favorite short-rail trip in the world, although it has attracted a mere 70,000 views). Watching a video is not as mesmerizing as really riding a train, of course, and not nearly so demanding as driving one.
“I regard my videos as a sort of moving screen saver, just something in the background as opposed to something requiring 100 percent concentration,” Hitchcock wrote.
Some cab-ride fans simply weave the videos into their electronic cocoon of audio-video content. “Lots of people find cab rides stress-reducing and play them when they do homework,” Paolo noted. On a comment board associated with Cabview Holland, virtual train rider Quinn Torsius revealed that “while gaming, I put it on my second monitor.”
A few viewers are even more laid back. “Some people comment that they find it very relaxing to watch,” Hartogsveld wrote. “The monotone sound makes them fall asleep.”
Jenkins is a writer based in D.C. Find him on Twitter: @MarkJenkinsDC.
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