'I like the traffic, the hustle and bustle of the great railway stations,' – wrote Sienkiewicz in Listy z podróży do Ameryki [Letters from a Journey to America]. As he admitted in the same collection, he also had other peculiar railway tastes:
As a man imbued with a love of all things domestic, I adore not only our railways but also all the accidents that happen to them, from the rails breaking on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway to the romanticism with which the trains of the St Petersburg railway turn upside down or are late.
As we know, train travel at that time was not the most pleasant experience: in addition to compartments closed from the outside or clouds of smoke penetrating through the windows in the tunnels, the then imperfect heating system reared its head in winter – the seats were heated from below. And we learn about this experience from Sienkiewicz:
It soon became so hot in the carriages that it was impossible to sit down. As you know, our carriages are heated from under the seats, which occasionally made me feel as if I was a teapot sitting on a samovar.
His Listy z podróży do Ameryki is essentially an account of railway travel. The writer set off on 19 February 1876 by the Warsaw-Bydgoszcz Railway to Prussia (with a change of trains at the border town of Aleksandrów) and continued through Toruń, Berlin, Cologne, Brussels to Calais, where he changed to a ship. In England, where 'progress rushes [...] forward as fast as the local locomotives, but dressed up in a medieval costume', he continued to travel by train – with a stop in London, where he took the 'underground railway'. On 23 February, he sailed from Liverpool to the USA.
Railways are also an integral part of his American adventures – the writer, among others, travelled across the continent from east to west on the First Transcontinental Railroad. He lived in a carriage, slept in a carriage, ate in a carriage and became so accustomed to this railway rhythm that he, for some time afterwards, could not sleep 'without the usual railway rumble and the usual railway tremble'. He compared American trains with European ones (which, in his opinion, were at a disadvantage to those from the Old Continent – 'all the stories about the crazy ride are just fairy tales'); he described his fellow passengers, sketching an interesting gallery of characters straight out of a Western ('those bearded men with revolvers sticking out of their back pockets but with increasingly wild faces [...] adventurers of all states who have abandoned other occupations for the expected fabulous profits in the mountains').