Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

During the weekend, I took the overnight train to Xi'an to attend a friend's wedding ceremony. It was not until I lay my head on the train's creaky bunk bed that I realized that it had been five years since I was last on a sleeper.

With each rhythmic chug, I was visited by past memories of sleeping in train carriages.

When I was at college, I used to take the sleeper six times every year, between Beijing where I was studying and my hometown in Shanxi Province. But as China has upgraded its trains, shortening the time the journey takes between the two places from 12 to four hours, I've had fewer and fewer occasions to take the sleeper.  

The strangest thing is, as time passed, I started to miss it. Some of the high-speed trains are equipped with sleepers, but what I missed was the slow train, the overnight train, the rickety, cheap train I took when I was a student.  My fascination with sleepers is not for technical reasons. I don't wonder about how its engines work, or how much horsepower it needs to carry its hundreds of passengers each day across half the country.

My interest in sleepers is because of the cherished memories I associate with them - with the sound of its distant whistle, with its poetic chugging and its conspicuous rumbling.

I was 9 years old the first time I slept on a train. I remember opening my eyes the next morning to see pure white snow outside the window. That was the first time that I ever visited Harbin, in China's frosty north, and I've never forgotten the exhilaration of that moment. 

After I left my hometown for college in Beijing, the sleeping train became an iron symbol of the connection between my home and the university.

Six of my schoolmates routinely traveled with me on that line, and we would always use the time on the train to share little secrets, play games and chat with strangers. One of my friends even snagged herself a boyfriend on the sleeper, after exchanging their beds. Their love story was the talk of the town among our friends for a long time after that.

For the last five years, I've only taken the high-speed train. It's more comfortable, faster and has a more extensive network that covers all of China's provincial capitals. But I have no feelings of affection toward it.

Inside high-speed trains, passengers are immersed in their own little worlds, watching movies, playing video games and browsing social media. Most remain silent for the entire four or five hour journey.

Maybe some people simply don't like socializing. Or maybe it takes 14 hours for people to get over their shyness, and start talking to their fellow passengers. When I look out the windows of high-speed trains, the view outside is always either barren wasteland or one tunnel after another, as the unbearable noise and nonstop construction of more high-speed railway lines force nearby villagers to relocate to other places. 

The number of sleepers in China are dwindling fast. Soon, perhaps, these older trains will be nothing more than a haunting sound that only exists in the memories of people like me.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.