A New York City holiday tradition, the annual Nostalgia Train rides provide an opportunity to travel back in time on vintage subway cars, and experience a taste of city life from long ago. The trains are maintained and provided by the New York Transit Museum, and come complete with the antique advertising signs, squeaking brakes, and bone-rattling ride that they provided in the 1930s or 40s.

These Nostalgia Train rides are extremely popular, and many passengers choose to enhance the experience by dressing for the occasion as their grandparents might have, way back when. Some also participate in the events by providing live music from the era, or by performing in groups of swing dancers on the subway platforms. It’s New York, after all, so of course it’s a party. The Nostalgia Train is limited to a Sunday schedule, beginning after Thanksgiving and continuing through December, and covers only a few miles of one of the world’s most extensive subway systems. Needless to say, the vintage trains (as well as many of their colorful passengers) can offer an unusual opportunity for photography. However, there are some real challenges to be overcome: the rush-hour-like crowding, the constant lurching of the trains in motion, and the limited mobility are just a few.

‘Nostalgia’ has been defined as ‘a sentimental longing for the past’. It is said to derive from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain), suggesting a feeling of both memory and melancholy. The word itself was said to be invented by a Swiss doctor in the late 1600s, with a literal meaning of “the suffering evoked by the desire to return to one's place of origin”. In the real world of today, I’m not sure that dramatic explanation describes the feeling that most of us would associate with nostalgia.

It is, though, interesting to consider the ways in which people appear to experience or embody a feeling of nostalgia. For instance, there are those who make the effort to come in costume to the Nostalgia Train rides. Most of them appear to be far too young to be trying to recapture a youth of their own in the 1930s or 40s; clearly, most were not even born until decades later. In that case, is it really nostalgia, or simply the dress-up fantasia of a costume party? Or might it be a broader form of nostalgia; not necessarily a longing for a return to one’s own past, but a romantic, perhaps subconscious yearning for a sepia-tinted time when life was believed to be simpler, and the world more unspoiled? Perhaps the allure of nostalgia is an expression of the larger, more powerful force that it represents: time. Nothing can withstand the passage of time- no living being, no monument created to outlast us, not even, as science tells us, the earth or the sun. And we live in a world in which time seems to pass more quickly than ever. Is it any wonder, then, that we might find fascination with -and feel nostalgia for- a time gone by? And which of us wouldn’t be tempted by the thought of travelling back in time?

“Don’t look back- something might be gaining on you” - Satchel Paige