Interesting point about how geography is reshaped by the way train service may be offered and routed

The Guardian has a story, "Europe’s geography ‘kind of reshaped’ as Paris-Berlin night train returns," on the "NightJet" trains -- overnight night train service between major European cities.  The services were dropped a number of years ago and are now coming back.

They mean geography more in terms of between cities, and train versus airline travel.  But the way the train line is routed changes how people may think about geography too.

I read that article around the same time as an article about newly proposed train service in the Detroit area, which will be set up to serve Detroit Metropolitan Airport, which is in Western Wayne County, and currently doesn't have train service ("Proposed train route would connect Detroit to Toledo & Cleveland, add DTW stop," WXYZ-TV).  From the article:

The proposal would start in Pontiac and go through Royal Oak and Detroit to the airport before heading down to Toledo and east to Cleveland. It will use CN, Conrail, NS, CSX and Amtrak railroads, according to Amtrak.

By routing it this way, it uses tracks emanating from Ann Arbor to reach Toledo.  But interestingly, it won't connect to a more northerly line serving Flint, Port Huron and other Michigan cities.

To me, it's not routed "directly", the way you would think, from Flint to Toledo, providing multiple connections to existing or proposed lines.

OTOH, it may be the least expensive way to provide service to the airport.

(Also note that in the "old days" train service to Toronto was routed through Port Huron, Michigan/Sarnia, Ontario, and the new proposed routing provides different connections, without connecting Sarnia to the new route.)

At the same time, the point about reshaping geography is similar to criticisms about transit diagrams, which aren't really maps per se as they can be distorted from how things are actually laid out distance-wise, but are organized in a manner to make getting around by transit more legible and easier to understand ("London Underground Maps," Edward Tufte, "Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users' Representations of Urban Space, Social Studies of Science, 2008).