Another chef du train – one of about three who seemed to be aboard – came into the car, and I asked him where we would be stopping. He kindly handed me his iPhone, open at a page where the stops were listed, and then disappeared. I began noting down the stops, but gave up after half a dozen. There were seventeen in all.
Len turned up – not for a drink: ‘I’ve just had half a bottle of wine in the compartment.’ He had also eaten. ‘The secret to enjoying European sleeper train travel,’ he said, ‘is a good Marks & Spencer’s salad.’ I showed him the list of the stops, and he said, ‘Perhaps it’s like a Parliamentary train – required by law to stop at all those places.’ He believed the Sud Express to be an important service: ‘You know it’s the quickest way of getting by train from north Spain to Portugal?’ (Nonetheless, the Portuguese government’s Strategic Plan for Transport, published in 2011, envisages the closure of the Sud Express.)
Len is a big traveller, but never by plane. He’d been a fan of the Trenhotels between Paris-Barcelona and Paris-Madrid, operated by the French-Spanish partnership called Elipsos. (They were killed off in 2013 when the TGVs began running from Gare de Lyon to Barcelona via Perpignan, at the other – more futuristic – end of the border from Irun. Passengers can then change at Barcelona for the Spanish high-speed route to Madrid.) Further back in time, he’d ridden the car-carrying sleeper train from Calais to Berlin, operated by Deutsche Bahn. He’d liked that train, and I took a sadistic pleasure in telling him that there are no longer any car-carrying trains from Calais.
The mode is deemed uneconomical, even if it is good for the environment. (All those cars going at seventy miles an hour with their engines switched off.) Car-carrying trains are associated with the 1960s and 1970s, when the car was king, but they ought equally to be associated with the 1830s and 1840s, when private carriages were often carried by train, their wealthy owners sitting inside, as though reluctant to capitulate entirely to this new transport mode. According to Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61, the Dutch Autoslaap trains to Italy were ‘a wonderful overnight experience’, with ‘an elegant restaurant car serving a 3-course dinner with great wine too’. They stopped in 2014. A Dutch company called Treinreiswinkel runs a car-carrying sleeper from Düsseldorf to Verona, and one from Düsseldorf to Vienna is operated by Austrian Railways (ÖBB). The French run several Auto-Trains, heading broadly south from Paris Gare de Bercy. But only the cars have the excitement of overnight train travel: their owners must go by ordinary day trains. Motorail trains in the UK stopped in 1995, bringing the curtain down on a world of nocturnal services between places apparently randomly paired: Cambridge-Edinburgh, Newcastle-Newton Abbot, Brockenhurst-Sterling. As a rule, the attached sleepers were second class only.
Len explained that, as well as his Marks & Spencer salad and bottle of wine, he always brought with him on a sleeper a door-locking contraption for supplementing the existing locks. He retreated to his compartment and came back with the clamp-like device. I told him I’d been robbed on the Thello train, and he shook his head at my naivety.
Len didn’t like to fly, but he wasn’t scared of terrorists – or rather, he thought it was absurd to take precautions against them. He’d met an American couple on the TGV Atlantique who’d boarded at Bordeaux, having flown there from Amsterdam, being determined to avoid Paris, which they considered too dangerous after the Islamic State attacks of November 2015. They were now aboard the Sud Express, presumably unaware that Islamic State claims much of the Iberian Peninsula, as having once been Muslim territory.
Len went back to his compartment, and I ordered dinner: Parma ham and olives for a starter, cod in garlic sauce for main, with ‘seasonal fruits’ (in practice a dry bit of pineapple) to follow. It wasn’t bad overall, and the cost – sixteen euros – included another can of beer.
I finished eating as we called at Vitoria, where nobody got on, and nobody got off. By now, I was alone in the dining car. I was oppressed by the thought of the taciturn Spaniard in the compartment. Should I delay my return so that he could fall asleep undisturbed? Or perhaps he was waiting for me to return, so as to get the disruption I would cause out of the way, and we could both settle down? I decided the best policy was to order half a bottle of vinho verde for six euros. After a further half an hour, there was no putting off bedtime.
The silent Spaniard had left the door hospitably propped open. He was lying on one of the two top bunks fully dressed and reading a paperback. In the small litter bin next to the sink was a single neatly crushed can of Diet Coke, suggesting an abstemiousness on his part that made me feel guilty. (Might be one of the 25 per cent of the Spanish population who is unemployed?)
I removed my outer clothing, and self-consciously washed my hands and brushed my teeth. I was about to take occupation of the lower bunk on the opposite side – the number of which corresponded to that on my ticket – when I realised that the Spaniard would be able to observe me diagonally from his elevated vantage point. I didn’t want to be observed, and no doubt he did not want to observe me, so I took the bunk directly beneath his. Having climbed beneath the comfortable and clean duvet, it struck me that I might now be occupying a berth someone else had booked, and would be expecting to occupy at a later point. But it was too late to do anything about that.
The Spaniard now began another muttered phone call, as I worried about the following:
1. Should I have closed the door?
2. Should I have closed the curtains?
3. Who would switch off the light?
I watched apparently nondescript Spanish countryside, shrouded in greenish gloom, as it rolled past the window. I quite liked the curtains being open. It would be like going to sleep with the television on and the sound turned down.
At eleven o’clock, the Spaniard finished his phone call, climbed stealthily down from his bunk, and went to the lavatory. He returned, shutting – but not locking – the door, climbing back into bed and turning off the light. He was emerging as the alpha male in this situation, leaving me to second guess all his actions. He had not closed the curtains. Why not? And why had he not locked the door? An obvious answer presented itself: he knew we were about to be joined by another passenger.
At twenty past eleven, we slid into the hazy orange light of a deserted railway station, verbosely designated Valladolid Campo Grande. It was deserted except for one traveller, a muscular young man carrying a rucksack and a skateboard. He entered the train, then stomped along the corridor to our compartment. I pretended to be asleep as he undressed to his boxer shorts in the dark. There was a fifty-fifty chance that I was lying in his bunk. If so he didn’t raise any objection, but just climbed into the lower bunk on the opposite side. So it was that I spent the next seven hours trying to pretend I was not aware of this character as he alternately slept, lay awake in various postures, sometimes under, and sometimes on top of his duvet. I did not sleep at all, and felt repeatedly jostled, in spite of the TALGO bogies, and the broad gauge, both of which are supposed to give a smoother ride.
The low point came at the big junction of Medina del Campo, north-west of Madrid, at midnight. We approached the station through an industrial landscape, sliding past a frighteningly high concrete silo that I couldn’t see the top of, however much I craned forward in my bunk. We pulled into the empty station directly next to an energy-saving lamp that, over a cycle of about a minute, flared from a low glow to a bright dazzle. This continued for twenty minutes until we rolled slowly out of the station. Some gentle buffering took place, denoting a change of engine. (The electric loco is replaced with a diesel here.) We then rolled slowly back into the station, the compartment window becoming once again perfectly aligned to the light. The torture resumed for another half an hour, the timetable requiring us to spend an hour in total at Medina del Campo. I would have got up to close the curtains, but the skateboarder – lying complacently with hands behind his head – gave every indication of being awake and enjoying the show. There was always a lot of messing about a
t Medina del Campo. The opening, in 1895, of the line running west from there to Fuentes de Oñoro on the Portuguese border gave the option of cutting out Madrid, which the Sud Express had previously passed through. The option wasn’t always taken, and the train would divide at Campo for either Lisbon or Madrid.
We pulled away, and Spain continued to unfold beyond the window. Perhaps it is considered rude to close the curtains on Spanish trains; but then why have curtains? This did feel like a very foreign train. It seemed significant that it had not – well, not since 1890 – originated at Calais. In Holy Week of 1900, W-L offered an excursion to Seville, using the Sud Express as far as Madrid. A poster, in the shape of a minaret, depicted old Seville, and a Semana Santa procession led by figures in pointed hoods and masks. The Sud Express differed in other ways from the standard trains de luxe. While the service was suspended during the Spanish Civil War (both sides helped themselves to the W-L rolling stock), the Spanish portion of the service continued to run during both world wars, Spain being neutral. In 1943, indeed, W-L had introduced a new Spanish service: ‘Lusitania’, operating from Madrid to Lisbon, and parent to the current Spanish Trenhotel sleeper service of that name. The Lusitania carriages, and some of the other W-L sleepers and diners in Spain, were painted silver, in the hope that it would deflect the heat of the sun better than dark blue, but it showed the dirt, and so the silver was ditched in 1959. (Lusitania, incidentally, was a Roman province of Iberia.)
At 2.30, at the border town of Fuentes de Oñoro, electrification resumed, and so we changed locos once again. We reached Mangualde 03.46. At 18.37 on 11 September 1985, a few miles west of here, the Sud Express, heading towards Spain, crashed headlong into a local train. The line was – and is – single, and trains were supposed to pass each other using the loop at Nelas, west of Mangualde. The local was proceeding towards the loop, believing the Sud Express to be running late, but the express had made up time. Approximately 150 people died, making it the worst rail disaster in Portuguese history.
At 06.30, after Entroncamento, there came a loud rapping on the door. I opened it, and one of the chefs du train looked in, saying, ‘Forty-five minutes to Lisbon Oriente!’ thus waking up the other two. While they stayed in their bunks, I furtively put on my trousers and shirt, but in the gloom of dawn I couldn’t find my boots. Rain lashed against the window and – as I discovered while walking along to the buffet in my stockinged feet – it had leaked in at the carriage ends, forming puddles at the interconnections. Another black mark for the TALGO system. So it was with wet feet that I ate the breakfast being cheerfully doled out by the two Portuguese: strong, sweet coffee, orange juice and a plate with three pastries on it.
At 07.20, I disembarked at Oriente. Lisbon was in the grip of an Atlantic storm, to which the spectacular architecture of this modern station – a soaring roof held up by neo-Gothic pillars – left me fully exposed. (There were no walls, so the rain blew in from the sides.) All my fellow passengers scurried to the exits on the lower levels of Oriente. If they were excited at their arrival, they had a funny way of showing it, but perhaps they had other business immediately in hand. The Sud Express had always been a staging post to further adventures, and many of those on board would have been connecting at Lisbon for the steamers heading for Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo. In any case, I remained on the beautiful, limestone-tiled platform, savouring the wildness of the weather, illuminated by the gentle orange lights of the station, which occasionally flickered, as though slightly daunted by the storm.
LISBON
After a wash in a (probably haunted) gentleman’s lavatory located in one of the deserted subterranean galleries of Lisbon Oriente, I took a Metro downtown, disembarking at Restauradores. Here, at Rua 1 de Dezembro, a vision from the past emerged with the aid of clearing rain and strengthening sun: the Avenida Palace, a neoclassical hotel, commissioned by Nagelmackers and opened in 1892. The architect was José Luís Monteiro, who had also been responsible for the building next door, completed in the previous year. While the Avenida Palace looks like a hotel, the building next door looks like a strange kind of church, except for the Starbucks set into the façade. The apparent absence of any railway lines notwithstanding, this is in fact a railway station: called Central Station when it opened in 1901, it later became known as Lisbon Rossio. In Station to Station, Steven Parissien writes that Rossio ‘drew inspiration from the Maneuline architecture of the Portuguese Renaissance. The two horseshoe-shaped entrances recalled a time of Portuguese greatness, of the wealth and opulence of the Portuguese Empire before the ignominious Spanish annexation of 1580.’ I walked inside and, yes, there were trains (they come in via a tunnel, as with Gare d’Orsay), many of them going to the suburb of Sintra. Parissien adds that ‘the interior is a great disappointment’. The side walls of the train shed feature pretty tiled medallions advertising Portuguese regional produce, which do look like the kind of decorations you see on the wall of an upmarket delicatessen.
The design was controversial. Monteiro took some flak over it, so he was perhaps relieved at the commission for the more conventional hotel. A suspended walkway connects the third floor of the hotel with the station. This was for the use of VIP arrivals on the Sud Express. I myself merely walked from the street into the hotel, but only after a couple of enjoyable days spent in Lisbon with my wife, who arrived courtesy of easyJet, having ‘no interest whatsoever’ in going there by sleeper train.
I wandered through a plush, pinkish lobby towards the bar, which was nearly spoiled by the presence of a widescreen TV showing football with the sound turned down. A woman was playing piano with all the restraint and delicacy of the late Liberace. On the other hand, a glass of decent white wine was a relatively modest five euros. No railway memorabilia was on view. I approached the reception, meaning to ask, indignantly, why not, but as soon as I mentioned the name of Nagelmackers, the desk clerk reached for a box containing numerous A4 envelopes of good-quality paper. ‘In English?’ he said, and he handed over what turned out to be a very comprehensive, if quite fruity and erratically translated, history of the hotel:
A private orchestra flooded the rooms with music during their famous Saturday balls, and while the dancing pairs challenged love, spies from everywhere looked for conspiracies. A special Night Service, characterised by an exquisite French ‘a la carte’ cuisine, sustained the hours, and ‘seasoned’ the most fierce emotions. The aromas of Parisian fragrances filled the air with the faint and sweetish scent of a decadent monarchy.
Sometimes the Sud Express terminated at Santa Apolónia Station, situated on the banks of the Tagus, and the oldest of the four in Lisbon. But most of the international traffic was concentrated on Rossio from the 1890s until the 1950s, so those ‘Parisian fragrances’ must have included the ‘aroma’ of the steam-hauled Sud Express, fuming away directly next door.
6
THE BERLIN NIGHT EXPRESS
THE NENE VALLEY RAILWAY
This journey on the night train from Malmö to Berlin could be said to have begun in Cambridgeshire.
The Nene Valley Railway (NVR) is a preserved railway near Peterborough. It has track clearances that can accommodate the bigger continental loading gauges, and is home to many foreign vehicles, which are being restored under the auspices of its subsidiary, the International Railway Preservation Society (IRPS), as quickly as funds allow, which is not very quickly. The IRPS is restoring, amongst other things, a German shunter, a Danish loco, a Swedish loco and British vehicles including some Travelling Post Offices (TPO), one of which, TPO M30272M, was on the train robbed in the Great Train Robbery. These will be exhibited in a Night Mail Museum, which combines the two interests of Phil Marshall, founder of the IRPS: night trains and mail trains.
One railway journalist raised an eyebrow at mention of the NVR. He said its collection was ill assorted, like a ‘railway zoo’. But for some of us, a visit to the line is the next best thing to taking a foreign railway holiday. Two minutes
off the A1, you’re on the pretty country lane leading to its headquarters, Wansford Station, once an important junction of the Great Northern Railway, whose early-Victorian station building looks even older, being Jacobean in style.
At Wansford you enter the NVR dreamworld, as presided over by Phil Marshall, who lives in a flat on the station and works round the clock on the restoration of the rolling stock. Phil is one of the leading British authorities on W-L matters, and a nice chap, but he is also very busy. Whenever I see him, I am guiltily aware that I am keeping him from some essential task – not that he consciously guilt trips me, it’s just that he’s always holding a paint pot or a spanner.
After picking Phil’s brain, I visit the rambling secondhand bookshop. Amid the thousands of dusty volumes (all about railways, of course), are back numbers of the International Railway Preservation Society Journal, which often covers Wagons-Lits matters. For instance, one article, entitled ‘In Lament of Oostende Atelier’, opens:
There can be no greater place to stir the emotions than the spiritual home of WL, Oostende Atelier … The hall that once echoed to the music of the riveter’s gun and the banter of its workers, lies ghostly silent. Only the rattle of the wind blowing the tin sheet roof breaks the silence, while the echoes of our footsteps call back from its walls … Outside is a heap of ashes that was once the Teak Restaurant car 2101.
A short walk from the bookshop brings visitors to W-L sleeping car number 3916, fading to sky blue under its tarpaulin, as mentioned in the chapter on the Nordland Railway. It was built in 1949, and is a veteran of the Nord Express. The gantry alongside gives a view of the dark corridor, and closed compartment doors. The view through the windows of another Wagons-Lits veteran undergoing restoration – dining car number 2975 – is more rewarding: you can see luggage racks, an old suitcase, dusty pink lamp-shades, marquetry (whereas number 3916 was built to an austere post-war specification, and had no marquetry even when brand new). According to the NVR website, ‘Number 2975 was built in 1927, and was used mainly in Switzerland, which is probably why it survived the War. It was brought to England for the filming of Stephen Poliakoff’s television play of 1980, Caught on a Train, which is set on an Ostend-to-Vienna night train.’
Night Trains Page 20