The women in Arno Bitschy's documentary This Train I Ride (2019) are not the kind you meet often where we live. They have chosen to travel alone, hopping clandestinely from one freight train to another across the United States, searching for a freedom that patriarchal society rarely extends to women.
Three women tell their stories: one in her twenties, one in her thirties, one in her forties. They traveled in different eras, at different times, taking different routes—each seeking that sense of balance they lost when they fled their everyday lives. Their experiences share a pattern, yet the women themselves are strikingly different: different temperaments, different choices. What director Arno Bitschy discovers as the thread connecting them never diminishes their individual identities, built over long months of wandering across the nation.
There's something unsettling about watching their movement, as if the camera's presence somehow prevents us from grasping their real reasons for traveling alone. The director becomes like someone you meet by chance—you confide in them, share part of your journey, then part ways. The images of landscape and sky split by railroad tracks are stunning. Yet the women seem to open up only when they stop, when they can sit with what they've experienced and how the journey has changed them. In their different ways, all three found a new stability—whether permanent, they cannot say. They used solitude to understand themselves better, and also to think about how they relate to others.
Perhaps the journey we witness is just one leg of something larger; certainly the trains will keep running, and someone will keep riding them.