For Wolfgang Schivelbusch, author of The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, even the ‘Grands Magasins’ of Paris are railway-related: ‘As Haussmann’s traffic arteries are connected to the rail network by means of the railway stations, and thus to all the traffic in its entirety, the new department stores, in turn, are connected to these new intraurban arteries and their traffic.’
Here is more from Schivelbusch about how the department store is essentially a railway phenomenon (and this fairly typical passage should help the reader decide whether they ever want to read another word by him or not):
The department store encourages the kind of perception that we have called panoramic. To recapitulate its essential characteristics as seen in the context of the train journey: as speed causes the foreground to disappear, it detaches the subject from the space that immediately surrounds him, that is, it intrudes itself as an ‘almost unreal barrier’ between object and subject. The landscape that is seen in this way is no longer experienced intensively, auratically (as by Ruskin, the critic of rail travel), but evanescently, impressionistically – panoramically in fact.
Certainly the glass-and-iron roof of the cavernous Galeries Lafayette department store, on Boulevard Haussmann, suggests a railway station to the extent that you can’t believe a full-sized gleaming locomotive isn’t somewhere about the premises, with commensurately large price tag attached.
The Gare de l’Ouest of Haussmann’s day has given way to the Gare Montparnasse of today, the third one to be built on the site, and from here, I would be starting my Sud Express journey. But it could easily have been elsewhere, because the starting point of the Sud Express has flitted about.
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The service was started by Nagelmackers in 1887, running from Calais to Lisbon via Irun in northern Spain. As mentioned, Nagelmackers also inaugurated the Nord Express from St Petersburg to Paris in 1896 with the idea of connecting it to the Sud, the fulcrum being his home town of Liège, but the through-link was never forged into one train, and the Russian Revolution, and the descent of the Iron Curtain, would kill the project
When it began, the Sud Express was one service but two trains, because the Iberian track gauge encountered at the border was – and is – different from the French: five foot six, as against the standard gauge of four foot eight and a half, disseminated by George Stephenson to more than half the railways in the world. While passengers heading south changed at Irun, those coming back the other way – from Lisbon to Calais – changed at Hendaye, just inside the French border. Hendaye and Irun are separated by the river Bidasoa, and a signalman’s nightmare is created by the existence of both track gauges on the bridge over the river, which is officially called the Santiago Bridge, but also known as the International Bridge.
From as early as 1890, the Sud Express spurned Calais, starting instead at Gare du Nord. Yes, Gare du Nord for the Sud Express, because the departing trains immediately ran around the Ceinture to point south. Originally, the two trains forming the Sud were both sleepers, but in 1900 the first of the two became a day train, and began leaving from Gare d’Orsay at around noon, arriving at Irun at nine-thirty in the evening. (By now, the Sud Express was running three times a week, whereas at first it had been weekly.)
In 1900 the brand new Gare d’Orsay must have presented a Jules Verne scene with its combination of electric trains and antique, beaux arts splendour. In the Paris flood of 1910, the tunnel connecting that station to its parent terminus, Gare d’Austerlitz, was inundated, so the Sud Express terminated for a while at one of the humbler stations of the Paris-Orleans Railways: the one at the southern Parisian suburb of Juvisy. A booklet called ‘Orsay’, available from what is now the museum, states:
The Gare d’Orsay, under more than five metres of water, was nicknamed Gare d’Ys, Ys being the name of the legendary Breton city believed to have been submerged in the 4th or 5th Century. People came to catch a few large fish and look at their reflected image floating in the water.
The accompanying photograph shows an electric luggage ramp – whose base was presumably on one of the submerged platforms – rising from the murky water towards the rococo, gilded clock, like the appendage of some robotic monster from the future. Incidentally, the Sud Express at this point was only hauled by an electric locomotive for the trip through the tunnel to the sister station of Gare d’Austerlitz. There, the nineteenth century resumed, and a steam locomotive was attached before the train began its journey south.
The Thomas Cook Continental Timetable for 1931 shows the train still departing from Orsay, at 10.50. In the following year, one of the best Maigret novels, The Madman of Bergerac, appeared. In this, the Inspector departs on a sleeper from Orsay to Villefranche, but the exoticism of the station was lost, either on him or his creator, Simenon, hence the aridity of the following:
Later that afternoon, having purchased a first-class ticket for Villefranche, Maigret boarded the train at Gare d’Orsay. The guard reminded him to change trains at Libourne.
‘Unless you’re in the sleeper compartment, which gets hitched to the next train.’
The detail of that 1931 departure from Orsay, by the way, contains the reassuring words ‘Pullman car’, and in the interwar years, the French leg of the Sud Express was the service that made most use of the blue-and-cream Wagon-Lits day cars.
Orsay stopped being a main-line station in 1939, when only a few suburban services were left dribbling away from the lower levels, and the Sud Express shifted to Gare d’Austerlitz. In 1973, it fused again into one train, running directly to Lisbon, thanks to having bogies that could be detached and replaced with ones of the different gauge. But it began to lose its W-L identity, because these through carriages were couchettes, not sleepers. In the late 1970s, the restaurant car of this through train became a ‘Grill Express’, then a bar car. The through service was killed by the advent, in 1989, of the TGV Atlantique from Gare Montparnasse to Irun, which made it quicker to do the journey as in W-L days: in two stages.
The name Sud Express is still occasionally used in Spain. But the man on the end of the London booking line for Spanish railways (RENFE) stopped me in full flow, saying, ‘Sorry, but you keep talking about the “Sud Express” and that confuses me.’ He would rather I spoke of the 18.50 RENFE Trenhotel departure from Irun to Lisbon, even though that is referred to in the European Timetable as the ‘Sud Expresso’.
This train perpetuates the second half of the old Sud Express. I asked the RENFE man if I could have a press ticket. He said he’d get back to me. After ten days, I pursued the matter, and he said my application had been forwarded to Portuguese Railways (CP) and they had not replied. Out of revenge, I therefore bought my ticket through the London office of Deutsche Bahn, where I spoke to a neurotically efficient German, who had a habit of muttering, while typing on his computer, ‘Yes, yes, this is all going through smoothly … no unexpected problems here at all …’
He set out the options with great trenchancy. A Gran Clase sleeper would provide sole occupancy with en-suite shower and toilet (and a complimentary small bottle of port). A Turista Clase two-bed sleeper involved the risk of sharing with one other person. The Turista four-bed might involve sharing with three others. I opted for this last one – at a cost of £70, half the price of Gran Clase – and the efficient German said, ‘Of the six berths remaining on this train, four are in one compartment, so I’ll book you into that one, and there’s a chance you’ll have it to yourself.’ (Actually, I’d have preferred to share, feeling I’d been making too many journeys as a sole occupant, but it would have been rather clammy to say so.)
The outstanding question was how to duplicate the first half of the old Sud Express. It was possible to take a French sleeper from Gare d’Austerlitz to Irun (a service that will have ceased by the time this book appears). But I’d had enough nocturnal anxieties at Gare d’Austerlitz, and if W-L had been able to dispense with a night train to Irun as early as 1900, it should be possible to get b
y without one in 2016. This dictated one of the TGV Atlantiques to Irun – which is why I had ended up at Gare Montparnasse.
THE TGV ATLANTIQUE
The ‘new’ Montparnasse was opened in 1969, but I prefer the previous incarnation, which I have seen only in photographs. The façade featured high-level lunette windows, through one of which an engine crashed in 1895, having leapt the tracks and careened across the concourse. It killed a female newspaper vendor – she was taking over her husband’s pitch for a few minutes – and was left dangling for several days, causing a PR headache for the Compagnie de l’Ouest. Of all the things you do not expect to fall onto your head, a steam locomotive must be near the top of the list.
The ‘new’ station – ‘a characterless curtain-walled slab’, according to Steven Parissien in Station to Station – is grey, modernist and multilevelled, but like Euston in London it feels subterranean because of the banishment of natural light. Whereas there is no excuse for the oppressive roof of Euston there is at least something on top of Gare Montparnasse: the Jardin Atlantique, which is always very peaceful, like a zoo from which all the animals have escaped. The station is flattered by contrast with the adjacent Tour Mont-parnasse, fifty-nine floors of sinister black brutalism, and such an aesthetic triumph that the city banned buildings over seven storeys in the aftermath of its erection. (The tower used to house the French hotel chain Accor, into which the Wagons-Lits company was subsumed in 1991.)
The train was packed, and not a duplex. It comes to something when a passenger complains of a train being only one storey high, but I had been spoilt by the previous TGV, which had been a duplex. In second class, the high backs of the seats – albeit stylishly angled like the wings of big birds – contributed to a slight sense of claustrophobia. But the colour scheme was warm: orange and purple, whereas first class was cool, with grey and lime. Christian Lacroix, designer of the interiors of the Atlantiques, irritated SNCF by mischievously inverting the usual hierarchy, whereby first is cosy and second less so.
The first stage of the journey takes place under a landscaped canopy, the Coulée verte, which hides the line. At Courtalain there is a junction, one line going west to Brittany and the other south-west to Tours. Ours went to Tours, which we reached after about an hour, and where our train slowed, since that is where the high-speed facility stopped. But it will be continued all the way to Bordeaux from 2017.
At 2.30pm – just after Poitiers – the buffet car was impenetrably crowded, owing to the French habit of all doing everything at the same time. I heard a northern-accented British woman asking the maître d’, with exasperation, ‘But haven’t you got any tea tea?’ ‘We don’t ’ave tea for milk,’ he said, proffering a variety of exotic infusions like a fanned pack of cards. The man accompanying the woman was called Len, and he was from Liverpool. He too would be taking the Sud Express for Lisbon – ‘because I don’t fly’. He would be in Gran Clase accommodation.
‘I’m in Turista,’ I said, ‘but perhaps we’ll meet in the restaurant car?’
‘Not sure we’ll be mixing with the riff-raff,’ he joshed.
After Len had quit the buffet car, it was gratifying to see a French woman explaining to the maître d’ how to make a cup of tea using Earl Grey and milk.
At Bordeaux, 80 per cent of the passengers got off the train. While we were stopped at the station, I turned to the woman in the seat next to me, who spoke good English, and said, ‘No offence, but I’m going to move, so we can both spread out.’ ‘Wait,’ she said, and over the next three minutes, the train filled up again. (The woman explained that she knew this line well, since her parents lived in Biarritz.)
We were late into Biarritz: six o’clock instead of ten-to, and I began to get anxious about the connection at Irun. But I took comfort from what the reassuring German booking clerk had said: ‘No way are they not going to wait for the passengers from Paris. That would mess things up for so many people!’
SUREXPRES
Summer was latent in Hendaye: a clear evening sky, but a breeze ruffling the palm trees and the Atlantic waters, the streets all but empty. As we approached the International Bridge over the river Bidasoa, the Iberian gauge tracks came into view alongside us. It is strange to see something so familiar as a railway track in a bigger size than you’re used to. You can’t quite believe the track is different. It’s as though you yourself have shrunk.
In Blood, Iron & Gold, Christian Wolmar writes, ‘Of Europe’s major nations, Spain was the most reluctant to join the railway age.’ When it did so, in the 1830s, it chose a five-foot-six-inch gauge (which is a polite way of saying five-foot-five-and-twenty-one-thirty-seconds of an inch), lumbering its neighbour, Portugal, with the same white elephant. Wolmar again: ‘The isolationist Spanish government made a political decision on the basis of military considerations, since it was felt that a change of gauge at the frontier would hamper any invading army.’ It was France – which, like most of Europe, had run with Stephenson’s standard gauge of four foot eight and a half – that Spain had in mind. Stephenson had tried to interest Spain in four foot eight and a half, but the government had shunned him just as they generally shunned Europe. In fact, as Wolmar points out, ‘France never showed more than a cursory interest in invading its Iberian neighbour.’ In fact, the obstructionist five-foot-six gauge might have been more useful in France for fending off Germany than it was in Spain for fending off France. Meanwhile, it held back the Spanish economy by making railways more expensive to build. More land was required to accommodate the wider gauge, which pointed up the virtues of narrow-gauge railways, and many of those were built, compounding the operational confusion. That the Spanish high-speed trains use the standard gauge is tantamount to an admission that the five foot six was a mistake. (The RENFE high-speed trains use German and French technology developed for the standard gauge.)
The other country that adopted a defensive railway gauge was Russia (five foot), and the ambition of Nagelmackers is shown by the fact that his Russia-to-Portugal Nord-Sud scheme would have involved two gauge changes. But Nagelmackers could take these things in his stride. A gauge change was an opportunity to show off, and the broad gauge could be taken advantage of. In 1884, he had begun running a Madrid-to-Portugal service, using coches-camas (sleeping cars) that took advantage of the extra width by having armchairs in the corridors.
We were only slightly late into Irun: half past six instead of twenty past. The Sud Express was scheduled to leave at 18.50. It waited on the opposite side of a station building that would once have been the customs hall. Here, the ‘Surexpres’ was given star billing on the departure board, outranking trains to Brinkola, Pontevedra and Miranda de Ebro. It constituted half a dozen white carriages with an electric loco on the front. The carriages, cordoned off behind a rope, like an exclusive nightclub, were unusually wide but low – and so were boxy, like a line of caravans. The train uses the Spanish TALGO technology first introduced in the early 1960s. TALGO stands for Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol, which means light articulated train. The bogies consist of only two wheels, not four, and they are shared between the back of one carriage and the front of another, which is supposed to give smoother riding over the long and curvaceous Spanish lines.
My compartment was untenanted. There were six seats of a quite pleasant light-and-dark-green check, the beds not yet being made up; there was a stainless steel sink in the corner, betokening that this was a sleeper, not a couchette. The compartment was set at an angle, like the German ones at Munich. The chef du train came to check my ticket. I’d been told that, as part of the general collapse of the Schengen agreement, border controls had been reintroduced between France and Spain. But the chef du train dismissed the idea with some contempt: I would not be needing my passport after all. ‘I come back at eight to make up the bed,’ he said. ‘Bed’, singular, so perhaps I would not be sharing?
We pulled away from Irun. Twenty minutes later, we stopped at San Sebastián, and I watched fatalistically as a th
in, reserved-looking chap of about my age with a backpack on his shoulder boarded the train and made unerringly for ‘my’ compartment. I indicated that, until the beds were made up, he could have the three seats on one side, and I’d take the other three. He smiled briefly in acknowledgement. ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, and he began making a phone call. To minimise the excruciation of trying to look elsewhere as he spoke quietly but intently in Spanish, I quit the compartment again. I went to the WC (perfectly logically ordered and clean), and then there was nowhere else to go but to the restaurant car. This was like an American diner, with high, cushioned stools at a bar, and a place for dinner set at each one.
It was a descendant of ‘Coches-Camas Cafeterías’, which began to replace W-L coches-comedor on the train as the world became more informal in the late 1950s. These were created by remodelling the end compartments of some of the S-type sleepers that ran on the Sud Express. A small kitchen was inserted for preparation of the dreaded (if you were George Behrend) ‘snacks’, which were sold over a bar with high stools. There was also a settee that, when the passengers had gone to bed, folded into a double bunk for the crew of two. The cafeteria offered Spanish ‘champagne’. At least, noted Behrend in 1962, ‘it is no longer disguised among the French champagnes on the wine list as “Sleeping Car Sparkling, special cuvée A. & G.”, as it was in 1902’.
All the stools at the present-day bar were occupied by a cheerful crowd, whose average age was about sixty-five. Most were Spanish. The diners were being served by two breezy Portuguese men, who combined so harmoniously in the adjacent kitchenette – the one putting a plate into a microwave, the other switching it on – that I thought they might be an item. They were equipped with half a dozen microwaves, but anyone ordering steak had it freshly cooked on a griddle. Cooking in the Wagons-Lits restaurant cars was done by coal-fired ranges until the very end (the late 1970s). According to one Wagons-Lits researcher, ‘The future looked bleak for the trains, so it wouldn’t have been worth doing a re-fit.’ In any given diner, the range was nicknamed by W-L staff ‘the Piano’.
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