Read, work, speak to people, look out of the window, drink some tea, nothing at all - there are many ways to spend time in a train. The commute would have been just as long (if not longer) by car but that would be time wasted instead of time for myself. Seeing those traffic jams from behind the train window (in the morning, by the time I went home the evening rush was already over) just was the icing on the cake, imagine sitting there in a tin can, waiting for the tin can in front of you to move, with another tin can behind you waiting for you to move...
I did, eventually, first by going to Canada and Alaska to paddle the Yukon down to the Bering strait, then to Sweden 'cause I met a Swedish girl. Had I not met her I'd have moved to Canada instead, that was my original plan. But... the job was fun, it paid well, I was single, I bought a house which I sold for twice the price after 6 years (before I moved to Sweden) so in that respect everything worked out as intended. I would not do this at this time and place given that I'm not single, I have children, I live on a farm in the woods and I have gigabit fibre which makes it possible to reach the world at the speed of light...
In Germany you can buy a yearly subscription for your daily commute train and that comes with a reserved seat and table and power plug for charging your laptop. From my observations, people are usually finishing powerpoint slides and answering emails during their commute.
I had a Dutch "OV Jaarkaart", a pass which is valid in all forms of public transport in the whole country, at any time. No reserved seats and no power plugs in the 90's of the last century, laptops were not as common as they are now and I got quite a few looks when I hooked up a Sony mobile brick to mine to remotely dial in to my box in the IT cave we called home. I usually wrote articles and proposals, hacked on random stuff or tried to build software I'd found on freshmeat.net or elsewhere.
Sad to say but a lot of people have car commutes in that range. The Bay has tens of thousands of "supercommuters" whose commute is 90mn or above.
In Europe train commutes in that range are probably more reasonable: you can sleep in the train (super common for the early HSRs), or it can count as part of your work-day (e.g. handle your mail or whatever, a good train seat often works just as well as an office desk).
I've known quite a few people who worked in large cities but wanted to live in the countryside (or at least in smaller cities, way out from even what's usually considered suburbs), they'd take regional or even high-speed train into and out of paris. Not necessarily cheap (especially if you take HSR), but frequent rider and (usually) company contribution made that surprisingly realistic.
Not the GP, but I used to commute two hours each way for college in Mumbai (including a switchover and long walks to/from the train stations). Used some of that time to finish assignments if I got a seat!
More likely twice a week: at the start of the weekend when going home to parents (and their washing machine), and at the end of it when going back to uni.
Nope, 5 days a week, left home around 07.00, came home around 21.00. I even had a washing machine all of my own together with a house to put it in. I actually had a washing machine as a student as well, it was old but it worked - until a house mate destroyed it, that is.