Why I Write About Train Stations When I Feel Stuck

There is a particular silence that lives on a platform at half past five on a winter evening. You stand there with your bag over your shoulder and the cold pressing into your collar, and the tracks hum with that low electric anticipation. I have come to love these moments, because they are the moments when my own thinking finally loosens.

I started writing about train stations long before I understood why. I would arrive early for a service out of Flinders Street and find myself watching a stranger adjust the strap of their bag, or counting the seconds between an announcement and a delayed arrival. My notebook would fill with small observations that meant nothing to anyone but me.

It was only later that I realised I was returning to the platform whenever my own work felt stalled. The station had become a kind of writing desk, one with flickering lights and tannoy announcements, but a desk nonetheless. There is something about the enforced waiting that allows the mind to wander productively.

This practice has shaped the way I approach every corner of my creative life, from essays to fiction drafts. The platform has become a place where stuckness meets movement, and the gap between the two is where I do my best writing.

The Waiting Room as a Writing Space

Writing requires stillness, but it also requires a certain pressure of time. A café can offer the first but rarely the second; a home office offers both but often drains them both through distraction. A train platform, though, hands you a peculiar combination: you are expected to wait, but the wait has a boundary. A train will come, and when it does, the moment ends. This pressure is generative.

I learned this by accident during a long winter in Melbourne, when my apartment felt too quiet to think in. I would walk down to the station with a notebook and buy a flat white from the kiosk, then sit on the bench and let my pen move. The hiss of the brakes, the murmur of the crowd, the slow roll of the timetable on the overhead board, all of it became part of the writing.

Train Stations Across Australia

I have written from platforms in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and the slow regional stops of Western Australia. Each station carries its own weather, its own dialect of movement. Central Station in Sydney hums with the urgency of a city that never quite sits down; Adelaide's parkland-side platforms have a softer, more sun-bleached patience. Perth's terminals feel like the edge of a continent, with the Indian Ocean not far behind every departure.

The architecture matters too. The tiled mosaics at Flinders Street, the vaulted roof of Southern Cross, the brutalist concrete of suburban stations built in the seventies, each one writes its own sentence into the day. I keep a folder of station names on my desk, partly for sound, partly for memory. Subiaco, Wolli Creek, Redfern, Beenleigh, they read like a poem already.

We complain about delays on the way to a footy match, and we meet friends under the clock at Flinders Street as if the clock were a small piece of national furniture. Writing from these places means writing inside a shared rhythm.

The Rhythm of Departures and Arrivals

Every train station runs on a heartbeat of arrivals and departures. You feel it in your chest when the doors open and the air shifts, and again when they close and the carriage pulls away. This rhythm is useful for a writer who feels stuck, because it gives you a cadence to write inside. You begin to hear your own sentences in the timing of the trains.

I have started writing paragraphs in the time between two announcements. You have perhaps ninety seconds, sometimes less, before the speaker cuts in with a service update or a safety reminder. In that window, a line will come, and you learn to catch it quickly or let it go. The platform does not negotiate.

What I See from Platform Three

Platform three is where I do my best work, although the number is arbitrary. It is simply the spot where my attention settles. From there, I watch people decide. A man in a hi-vis jacket decides whether to run for the train or accept the next one. A student decides whether to text her mother back now or later. Each decision is a tiny story.

Writing about these moments has taught me that stuckness is often a failure of decision. We sit at our desks waiting to feel inspired, but inspiration rarely arrives without a small act of will. The train platform reminds you that action is a series of small choices, made one after another, in the time you have.

Turning Stuck into Story

When I am properly stuck now, I do not reach for another coffee or another browser tab. I reach for my notebook and walk to the nearest station. Sometimes it is the big one, sometimes it is the little suburban stop with no café and a single bench. Either way, the act of moving changes something in the way I write.

I begin by describing the platform as if I were writing a letter. What does the air smell like? What colour is the light? Who is standing near me, and what are they carrying? These questions unlock the descriptive muscle, and once that muscle is warm, the narrative muscle begins to move.

From Notebook to Published Page

Some of these station notes have become essays, others have turned into characters, and a few have simply stayed in the notebook. All of them have taught me something about the way waiting and writing belong to the same family of acts. They have also shaped the way I read Australian literature, from the patient sentences of Tim Winton to the sharper commuter rhythms of contemporary Sydney writers.

The platform, it turns out, is not just a place to wait. It is a place to listen, to watch, and to begin. Every essay I publish here has somewhere in its bones the memory of a delayed train, a tiled floor, and the particular hush that falls over a crowd when the next service is finally announced.

If you have a station story of your own, or a piece of writing that grew out of a wait, I would love to hear from you. You can always reach me through the contact page, or send in a story for the submissions folder. The platform, after all, is a kind of shared room, and there is always more room for another voice.