The station sits beside a small roundabout, a long covered walkway above the road and a bare, rocky hillside behind it. I arrived with fifty minutes until the next train and a timetable I had printed and folded into quarters the night before.
A paper timetable does something a countdown cannot. It shows the gaps. You can see at a glance when the last train leaves and that there is nothing for an hour and a quarter in the middle of the afternoon, and you can plan a day around that. A screen only tells you about the next departure, and only while you are looking at it.
What the gaps are for
With the whole day on one sheet, I could see that waiting was the plan rather than a failure of it. I walked up the road until the hill started, turned back with ten minutes to spare, and read the sheet again on the platform to decide where to get off.
I don’t need to know the train is four minutes away. I need to know whether there is another one after it.
