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A town is often thought of as a number of localised activities, transport being nothing but the comsequence of the growth of the town and the wider spatial distribution of its activities, although neither entirely a ‘place’ nor an ‘activity’. This contribution analyses the arrangements put in place in one mode of transport, the metro Xinbeitou to Taipei, of which the originality has been to provide a particular tourist focus on the emotional dimension of travelling: the carriages display fictitious urban tourist practices without reference to the actual town or to its sites of interest. This tourist communications stategy makes use of fictional scenarios in order to create the desire to travel. It is studied here as a symbolic phenomenon linking common sense processes to other social situations and which is expressed via various communicational presentations.