‘Making Connections: The Relationship between Train Travel and the Processes of Work and Leisure’

Abstract

Many volumes have been written cataloguing and detailing the long-term or historical changes in the process of work. Similarly, much attention has been given to ‘doing leisure’. What most, if not all of these works have in common is that both work and leisure are seen as taking place either ‘in’ or ‘away from’ the home. The space between home and the place of work or leisure is seen as a separate entity: the ‘travel’ for which one normally requires a means of transport. Transport then is theorised as simply a way of getting from A to B. Indeed, those who study and theorise about transport are more likely to be in the discipline of engineering than of sociology. In this article we challenge all of this through a consideration of the work and leisure that individuals undertake on the train. We draw on our own experience and on empirical data from a pilot study of train users and also outline our future research and writing plans in this area.