Hello there!
The journey, as described in her essay, begins very sombre and almost detached, a stark contrast as she describes the sweltering heat of an intense and heavy summer day. Her attention is then caught by hearing someone speak very good Italian, a break from the plethora of other languages she had been hearing all day. It appears to come from a stout man standing on the platform, shouting profanities and blasphemies while shaking his fist at the sky. No one else was there except for railway officials and two women, who seem to be very grief stricken.
She describes the rest of what happens with careful detachment, lingering on describing the woman who is hanging on to the man, seemingly particularly disturbed by her grief and expression. The woman was afraid that the man would throw himself under the train, among other things. She keeps looking on, observing and unable to help, until the train draws away from the station.
The event has such an impact on her that she thinks about it for the rest of the day, particularly in the evening, where visions of the three figures haunt her as jovial, lively music plays, far off in the distance of the town where is staying.
In an article titled "The Railway Passenger; or, The Training of the Eye", Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett interpret Meynell's brief descriptive narrative as "an attempt to get rid of what one may call the "passenger's guilt" -- or "the transformation of someone else's drama into a spectacle, and the guilt of the passenger as he or she takes the position of the audience, not oblivious to the fact that what is happening is real but both unable and unwilling to act on it" ("The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble," 2007).
Hope this helps you!
