At the ticket window I asked for the branch line rather than the direct train, and the woman behind the glass asked, not unkindly, whether I was sure. She told me the time difference. I said yes. She printed it and shrugged in a way that I think was directed at the whole category of people who do this.
Walking to the platform I tried to work out what my actual reasons were, because I had answered before I had thought about it. I came up with three. One of them was good, one was situational, and one was the kind of reason you do not say out loud. That ratio is roughly right for most of the detours I have taken.
The good reason: connecting two things you already know
The best detours I have taken did not show me anything new. They joined up two places I had already been, and the joining was the point. You go somewhere, then somewhere else, and in your head they float unattached. Take the slow road between them and they lock into position. You find out that the valley you were in and the coast you were on are the same drainage, or that the two towns you thought of as unrelated are forty minutes apart and full of the same surnames.
This is the one that reliably pays. It is also why detours often feel more worthwhile on a second or third trip to a region than on the first, when everything is unattached anyway and one more dot changes nothing.
The situational reason: arriving at the right hour
Sometimes the long way is right because of when it puts you somewhere. The direct route arrives at eleven in the morning, when a small place is at its least legible, everybody at work and the streets empty. The long way gets you in at six, when people are out and the light is good and the one bar is open.
I do not always get this right, and there is a failure mode where the long way delivers you at half past nine at night to a place with nothing open and no way to get in anywhere. But when I have thought about the arrival hour rather than only the arrival, the extra hours have usually earned themselves.
The bad reason, which is mostly vanity
Then there is the reason I do not say at ticket windows: that taking the long way feels like a better class of travelling. That it makes a better story. That somebody who takes the direct train is doing tourism and I am doing something else.
This is nonsense and I still act on it. The tell is that when I take the long way for this reason, I am already composing the description while I am on the train. Nothing I have ever done for that reason has been worth the hours. It just produced a sentence.
The tax, including the part that is money
Detours cost more than time. Two shorter tickets often cost more than one long one. You eat out an extra time because you are between places at a meal hour. Occasionally you burn a night, which is a bed and a day.
They also cost margin. A direct route has one thing that can go wrong. A detour has three or four, and the connections at the far end of a branch line tend to be the least frequent ones, so a single miss can turn into four hours on a bench. I have had that. It is not romantic. It is a bench.
What the long way is genuinely better at
One thing detours do that direct routes cannot: they put you on vehicles that exist for local reasons. A branch line or a rural bus runs because people need to get to a hospital, a market, a school, a job. Riding it means sitting inside the actual traffic of a region rather than in the channel built for people passing through.
That is not the same as authenticity, a word I try to avoid because it usually means somebody enjoyed feeling like an insider for an hour. It is more practical than that. On those vehicles you can see what the region is organised around, and you get let off in the middle of small places rather than at a station on the edge, which changes the first ten minutes of everywhere you arrive.
What I ask myself now
Three questions, and none of them takes longer than the queue at the window. I ask them in order and I stop at the first bad answer.
One. Does this detour join two things I already have in my head, or is it just another loose dot? Two. What time does it put me down, and is that a good hour to arrive somewhere small? Three. If the middle connection fails, what happens, and can I live with that outcome tonight?
If the answers are decent, I take the long way and enjoy it without needing it to be profound. If they are not, I take the direct train and stop performing. On that particular day at the ticket window, the branch line joined two places I knew and got me in at a good hour, so it was defensible. I have booked a lot of others where it was not, and the woman behind the glass was, in her way, asking a reasonable question.