When James Joyce first travelled from Dublin to Trieste in 1904, he went via Paris, Zurich and Ljubljana. Zurich, because he mistakenly believed a job to be awaiting him there, and Ljubljana because – groggy after the night train – he thought they’d pulled into Trieste. By the time he twigged, the train had departed and, without ready cash, Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle had to spend a night on the tiles.

Preferring to travel by train, when I received the invite to be writer-in-residence at the James Joyce summer school in Trieste, I wondered if I might follow Joyce’s route. But repair work on Austria’s Tauern Tunnel prevented me from taking the exact route. Besides, today’s TGV tears through France at nearly 200mph, in comparison to the 25-60mph speeds at which Joyce would have navigated Switzerland and Austria. A night on the town in Milan is just as good for the muse.

Along the route from London to Trieste (and then by bus to Ljubljana), I considered the lineage of writers who traversed Europe in this way 100 years ago and how different their aesthetic, physical and emotional experiences must have been. And, importantly, what they would have seen. What we see from trains – and how we see it – reflects a century of profound social, economic and environmental transformation. Trains represent progress as much as they ever have, but – today – a different sort of progress.

My journey got off to an eventful start when the Eurostar announced delays due to cable theft near Lille. Around 600 metres of copper cable were stolen overnight from the high-speed line. A testament to the proficiency of France’s railway workers, we arrived roughly on time in Gare du Nord, Paris. A station where Joyce penned a letter to his brother, observing: “I hate the bustle but the station has its own strange poetry, the sound of footsteps, the distant whistle of the steam engines, and the sudden clanging of the signal bell.” For those sounds of steam whistling, coal shovelling, bells clanging, currencies exchanging and porters calling, today we have digital chimes, polylingual announcements, and beeping ticket barriers. Across the city, fake bird sounds chirp throughout Gare de Lyon, intending to induce calm, but instead making people search overhead for the poor trapped birds.

Instead of the illustrated posters of the belle epoque, emblazoning the walls of the metro from Gare du Nord today are climate change equations from Liam Gillick’s artwork The Logical Basis, commissioned for the COP21 climate conference held in Paris in 2015. Honouring the climate models of Nobel prize-winning physicist Syukuro Manabe, Gillick’s work has been criticised for not explaining the equations, and so keeping the simple, crucial facts of climate change at a remove from the general public.

It still seems to be the case that we don’t understand our own impact on the climate crisis. Electrified trains allow us to travel with a fraction of the carbon footprint of air travel. I still fly but try to find alternatives when I can. Less mental and moral gymnastics are required when travelling by land or sea – especially while temperatures break all records. So trains are simply more relaxing … except financially.

Virginia Woolf, who travelled solo from London to Turkey by train when she was 24, wrote that “a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again”. Never mind that woman, to see any person working in the fields from a train window these days is unlikely. Instead of vibrant country villages (and the explosion of cities taking place in the early 20th century), we have urban sprawl and suburbanisation that would have been unimaginable in Woolf’s time. Instead of the diverse cereal and crop production of a century ago, today’s fertilised pastures of animal agriculture and vast tracts of land used to grow animal feed dominate European landscapes. The consequences of that are everywhere, from the overall temperature (France is 1.9C warmer than it was in 1900) and weather pattern changes, to soil degradation, polluted air and waterways, and biodiversity loss. But to know how radically the landscape has changed in just a few decades is to know to what degree it can change again.

In the early 20th century, rail passengers would have witnessed the hydroelectric revolution, as water power in the Alps was being developed extensively. The construction of dams and reservoirs fundamentally altered alpine hydrology, creating the artificial lakes, dams, power lines and industrial infrastructure we’re used to today. One undoubtedly positive change in the past 100 years has been a significant effort towards reforestation. And while those forests are generally commercial – with about 80% classified as “forest available for wood supply” – natural forests and meadows are almost instantly possible with a shift towards a plant-rich diet, as just one example. And pastures might be replaced with solar or wind farms. Perhaps there’s something helpful in seeing where our energy comes from, so that we understand its impact. Writers took great courage in the hydroelectric revolution: it allowed them to reach the Alps by train. It represented progress, modernity and independence, as did the electric trains themselves.

For a period, rail became militarised, and trains were rerouted for troop movements and deportations, with civilians facing extreme delays, rationing and danger. Joyce fled his home in Trieste (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) during the first world war, as he was considered an enemy alien. At Feldkirch station in Austria, he narrowly escaped arrest. (His brother had already been separately arrested, in Trieste, and was detained until the end of the war.) He later told his biographer that “at Feldkirch station,” he “felt the fate of Ulysses was decided”. During the second world war, many writers and artists were among those who used Europe’s rail network to flee the Nazis.

When sniffer dogs boarded the TGV on the French-Italian border, and police demanded to see my passport and to know which bags were mine and the reason for my travel, I replied: “The James Joyce Summer School,” propping up my Books Upstairs tote bag and nodding at Ulysses on my tray table, which surely cast me as a bad spy. Before the first world war, passports and visas were rarely required within western Europe. After the war, this changed, and border stops were far longer and more frequent, to allow for paper checks.

But if Joyce carried a passport in 1904, it would have been a British one, with him being classified as a British subject. I was surprised to discover that Joyce repeatedly rejected the opportunity to obtain an Irish passport, post-independence. I knew from reading his work that he spurned narrow nationalism, embracing a cosmopolitan and diverse European modernism. But to reject an Irish passport was to limit his practical freedoms. Samuel Beckett’s Irish passport allowed him to stay in France and take part in resistance activities. Spending the vast majority of their lives on the continent, they both strongly identified as European. Europeanness is surely defined – even today – more by train travel than by anything else.

Despite Frantz Fanon brilliantly immortalising a racist incident on a train in France in his book Black Skin, White Masks, rail travel in Europe has been a sanctuary from racial prejudice for many, like Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay and poet Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote of the freedom from segregation and ostracisation on Soviet Union trains in particular: “No Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union”. He travelled to south central Asia on the Moscow-Tashkent express, a journey which Russia’s war on Ukraine prevents today – largely cutting off the entire eastern world from Europeans who don’t fly.

Trains have been for many artists a mode of escape as well as a means of belonging. They are communal and sustainable, and they cannot but make us more considerate. Post-Covid, there is something consoling in the quiet companionship of trains. Well, not always quiet, but writers spend so long alone in caves (with our characters), it does us good to remember that real people exist, with all their tuna sandwiches and taking off of shoes.

Class segregation is less stark today than in the 20th century’s first-, second- and third-class carriages. Today’s first and second classes are largely differentiated by seat size, phone-charging facilities, and the occasional cufflink. In place of Edwardian plush velvet upholstery and decadent dining cars, today we enjoy scratchy, synthetic, easy-to-clean interiors, and minimalist dining cars full of Dutch teenagers. Writers – barring those with patrons or trust funds – can generally be found in the cheap seats.

The enlivening, philosophical aspects of train travel carry on into the 21st century: observing life and landscape; partaking in a sustainable infrastructure; witnessing the endless novelty, education and privilege that it affords; making one think, as Joyce put it, “of all the worlds moving simultaneously”. Air travel has undoubtedly facilitated untold progress, but progress is subjective and contextual. It always involves an untold or suppressed story. Slow travel allows us to think in the longer term. It could serve us well to better see where we have come from and where we are going.

Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel is The Alternatives, published by Oneworld (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply