Night Trains

by Martin, Andrew;

  I was definitely feeling seasick. I thought I should lie down. I did have a sleeper train at my disposal, and a packet of Nurofen in my soap bag. So I descended the five steel floors to the car/train deck, and pressed the airlock.

  The train was largely empty. It was extraordinary to walk along the corridor. There was a feeling of light bounding as the train rose and fell. Entering my compartment, I couldn’t see how to access the top bunk (the only one folded down). Something could be pulled out of the side of it that initially looked like a ladder, but this turned out to be only two feet long, and proved instead to be a railing to stop you rolling out. They had almost exactly those railings on the Night Ferry. The only way to the top must be to fold down the middle and lower bunks, and step up using them. I made up the lower one, swallowed two Nurofen, and squirted water into my mouth from the tiny hole in one of the six cartons of mineral water that had been left for me on a complimentary basis (but minus the straws that surely ought to have been attached to them). I closed the curtain and got into bed. For a few minutes, it was touch-and-go as to whether the unaccustomed buoyancy of the train would send me scurrying along the corridor to the sink, but then the Nurofen kicked in, and I fell asleep.

  ***

  I awoke refreshed after an unknown period of time. I was not aware of the movement of the ship. Perhaps we had been shunted off the FS Sassnitz, and were stopped at some German signal. I opened the curtain, and there was the black four-by-four. I found my mobile phone and checked the time. Eight o’clock. I had slept for two hours, and so I still had two hours of the four-hour crossing left.

  I enjoyed those two hours. I had a quarter bottle of wine, then a meal, then another quarter bottle of wine, which I drank on the deck. By now the sun had coalesced into a red ball, low on the right side of the ship. Gradually – on that same side – the chalk cliffs of the German island of Rügen loomed out of the gloaming. Those cliffs are famous. They were painted by Caspar David Friedrich – for example in Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, which shows three figures gazing pensively through a jagged ‘V’ in the chalk. As usual with this painter, the symbolism is of death, but it’s a daytime scene, and one of Friedrich’s less glowering works.

  At ten-thirty, a hooter blared, and the ferry began reversing into Sassnitz harbour. An announcement was made: ‘Would drivers please return to their cars and train passengers please return to … the train.’ I descended into the hold again.

  The bow doors were open. A very big bloke in a high-vis jacket was regulating the level of the linkspan projecting from the dock, to match its tracks with those in the ferry’s hold. The rails were set in grooves, so it was a matter of matching these up rather than the rails, and the grooves would help keep the train on the rails as it rode over the crack. It seemed fitting that the operator was big, even though he was doing nothing more strenuous than pressing buttons on a control panel.

  A shunter pulled our train out of the hold, and propelled us to a lonely platform of Sassnitz Fährhafen Station (or Sassnitz Ferry Terminal Station). There, an electric locomotive was attached. But nothing else happened. We simply stood there, surrounded by freight. Then some German police turned up. Perhaps an emergency passport check was taking place? Another crack in the Schengen ideal? But the focus seemed to be one particular compartment in the next carriage along. After about twenty minutes, the police took a young, smartly dressed man off the train, and began questioning him under one of the platform lamps. I walked through to the carriage from which he’d been taken, and saw the German chef du train in his own compartment, which bore all the hallmarks of permanent residence, with books, magazines, biscuit tins; one bed was made up for sleeping, another as a sofa. He was very friendly, and seemed completely unconcerned by whatever the police were up to. I asked him about the delay. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘we stay here until three.’

  ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘Yes, normal. Ever since they made the ferry leave so early from Sweden.’

  So here was that familiar sleeper train tactic: holding the train so it reaches its destination at a civilised time.

  ‘So this delay is nothing to do with the police?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, waving away the idea.

  Just then a policeman came up and, politely excusing himself, interrupted us. He addressed the chef du train in German of course, but he was clearly indicating the young man on the platform, who was still being questioned by one of his colleagues. The only word I could make out was ‘Afghanisch’. Evidently the young man was Afghan. But this seemed to be fine, because the news of his nationality was being imparted with a sort of wondering smile by the policeman – an amused ‘Whatever-next?’ tone. If the Afghan had ever been a suspect, he was no longer, and he was now climbing back aboard the train with thanks and goodbyes all around.

  Asked what he made of the Brexit, the chef du train shrugged. ‘To me, it’s nothing. The politicians can sort that out. But when you were beaten by Iceland in the European Championships …’ That, he seemed to think, was the real disaster for Britain.

  I returned to my compartment. A crescent moon hung above a distant car park, which reminded me of the Night Ferry logo, and so in turn the book I had brought with me: Night Train to Paris, a thriller of 1952 by Manning Coles (‘Triumph number fourteen for Tommy Hambledon, the amiable Secret Service man.’ Daily Telegraph). Coles was two people, both with impeccable thriller-writing CVs. Adelaide Frances Oke Manning had worked for the War Office in World War One. Cyril Henry Coles had worked in British Intelligence during the war, often behind enemy lines. They later became neighbours in East Meon, Hampshire. In Night Train to Paris, a strait-laced English solicitor called Logan has accidentally got mixed up in some international espionage. Finding his life in danger, he decides to flee to Paris, in order to consult with his more worldly twin brother. He opts to travel on the Night Ferry: ‘Once aboard the train he would be quite safe.’ He is certainly still in one piece on arrival at Dunkirk, which provides the best scene in the book:

  He was awakened again by the train being shunted once more; he sat up, pulled aside the blind and looked out. There was no moon, but the scene was illuminated by arc lamps high and lonely on tall standards; there were many railway lines and beyond them the sterile unevenness which marks the site of bombed houses. There was a road with men cycling along it to work – and somewhere in the background, a ship.

  Logan goes back to sleep, only to be awakened soon after by a persistent tapping on his door. It is the chef du train, wishing to return Logan’s passport, or so Logan assumes.

  In The Ipcress File, the entertaining film of Len Deighton’s entertaining novel, Michael Caine (as Harry Palmer) is also fleeing a criminal gang by means of the Night Ferry. He too makes the mistake of opening his compartment door in response to an enquiry about his passport. There is a special DVD edition of The Ipcress File featuring a commentary by the American director Sidney Furie and the English film editor Peter Hunt. Even though the Night Ferry sequence is short, I was hoping for some revelations, but Hunt remains entirely silent during this part, while Furie says, ‘I love English trains, with their compartments and … things.’ (The Night Ferry was a French train.)

  The real Night Ferry appeared in the 1974 Christmas Special – the very last episode – of the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son. Michael Williams again:

  … it shows rag-and-bone man Harold dispatching his father abroad so that he can have Christmas alone with his girlfriend – in Bognor Regis. But sharp-eyed viewers may have noticed that the coaches were showing signs of their years.

  By the end of the 1970s British Railways were no longer putting much effort into publicising the train, and some ticket offices even denied its existence. The Paris-Dunkerque breakfast car was withdrawn and replaced by a snack-vending machine, although hot meals were restored after furious protests by passengers. Another blow came when computer-aided automatic landing was introduced for planes at Heathrow airport, diminishing another source of revenue for the trai
n, since it was always well patronised on foggy winter nights when there were likely to be severe air delays.

  The sleeper carriage expert, Brendan Martin, had told me his abiding memory of the Night Ferry was the feeling of sheer relief as, after all the shunting in the small hours at Dunkirk, a French electric loco was attached to the train, and it began speeding smoothly towards Paris. At 3am I experienced something similar, as the Berlin Night Express finally started becoming … if not an express, then at least a moving train. Like Logan, I managed to switch out the light after making ‘careful study of an embarrassing array of knobs and switches’ located above the compartment door.

  TERMINUS

  At half past six, the chef du train announced over the intercom, ‘We are approaching Berlin, which is our terminus. Change here for Warsaw, Utrecht, Budapest’ and too many other places for me to write down in my notebook. Before Berlin there would be a tunnel. ‘And I want to inform you not to pull the emergency brake in the tunnel,’ the chef du train added. I was reminded of a not-very-funny ‘funny’ railway book of 1959, written by C. Hamilton Ellis and called Rapidly Round the Bend: ‘Everyone is well-behaved on a German train. The Travel-guests are forbidden in a Notsmoker to smoke, in the wagon out to spit, their boots on the bolsters to place, unprotected hatpins to carry, out to lean, before the train halts to open …’ The anti-foreign Edwardian journal called Travel used to go in for this kind of heavy-handed satire of German railway officialdom – which was put to shame by the chef du train’s sign off: ‘Thank you very much for travelling on Snälltåget, and I hope you will have a very nice day.’

  After the tunnel came the Stadtbahn, the viaduct that carries trains from west to east of the city, or the West to the East, as used to be the case, and politics has frequently checked those trains. We passed Ostbahnhof, then Friedrichstrasse, but we didn’t get as far as the former endpoint of the Berlin Night Express, Zoo Station, since we terminated at Hauptbahnhof. This is now the principal station in Berlin, and it is a ‘new’ one, in that it’s a rebuild – opened in 2006 – of the Lehrter Bahnhof, which dated from 1871. Hauptbahnhof is multi-levelled, like several stations on top of one another, and the train movements are advertised to the city in that they are visible through the glass walls. Top billing, as it were, goes to the pretty mustard-and-red trains of the S-Bahn, which come in at the highest level, even above the white ICE trains of the high-speed network.

  I disembarked from the Berlin Night Express and ascended to one of the most hygienic station lavatories it has ever been my privilege to use. It was called ‘Rail and Fresh’, and well worth the one euro entrance fee. At the exit, a notice read ‘Please disinfect your hands’, and C. Hamilton Ellis did come to mind again. Now it was breakfast time. On the Night Ferry, breakfast was always the main meal. Some people took dinner on the train, but since it left Victoria at around ten o’clock (the departure times varied), quite a few went straight to bed on boarding. Everyone took breakfast, however, compounding the pleasure of Paris looming. In the 1960s, it was eight shillings for the ‘Le Meat Breakfast’, which involved that French rationalisation of eggs and bacon: oeufs au plat, with ham instead of fatty bacon, and more than one egg. It was served, along with chipolata sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms, on a scorching metal plate taken straight from the coke-fired range and wrapped in a white napkin. As on all the Wagons-Lits, the tea, coffee or hot chocolate was served in soup bowls, to guard against spillage.

  I myself breakfasted off a couple of muffins, at the Hauptbahnhof branch of McDonald’s. Then it was out into Berlin on a very hot sunny morning, past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and along Unter den Linden, which was like a diplomatic theme park, with its modern embassies, hotels and a Starbucks. A new S-Bahn station is being constructed below Unter den Linden, and where the building works are screened off from pedestrians, there are displays showing the history of the area, which was flattened by bombs in the war. The architecture was more beautiful before, and even though the historical displays urged me to think of the good and bad in German history, I was focused on the bad.

  I walked for ten minutes to a sad display of crumbling brick Romanesque arches, with a modest public garden attached. This might have been the ruin of a church or monastery. In fact, it used to be Anhalter Station, which, unlike the stations on the Stadtbahn, points south. It first opened in 1841 as little more than a halt, and was rebuilt on a bigger scale in the 1870s. Here is what Roger Moorhouse has to say about it, in Berlin at War:

  The rebuilt Anhalter Station served rail traffic to the south, initially in the direction of Leipzig, Frankfurt and Munich, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it was also serving destinations as far afield as Athens, Rome and Naples. By the 1930s it was handling over 40,000 passengers a day, with trains leaving, on average, every four minutes. It soon became known as Berlin’s ‘Gateway to the World’.

  It was also Hitler’s gateway, in his expansionist phase. His private train was stored there; it was to Anhalter – bedecked with swastikas and laurel wreaths – that he returned after the victorious French campaign in 1940. It would become associated with the movement of troops to the front, and of 9,000 Berlin Jews to the camp at Theresienstadt. If this station symbolises the particularly railway-oriented aspect of Nazi hubris, it is fitting that a certain blue carriage should have ended up there. The voiture-restaurant in question, number 2419, could not have got there as a result of any normal running. Wagons-Lits was evicted from Germany in the Second World War, as it had been in the first, so this had to be a special situation.

  Number 2419 was a brand-new dining car when, in 1918, the Supreme Allied Commander, Marshal Foch, recruited it into his private train. He had the kitchen taken out, and customised it as a mobile office. The Armistice of 11 November 1918 was signed in this car, when it was berthed in a siding in the forêt de Compiègne, with the rose-coloured, silk-shaded lamps lit at 5am, when the signing occurred.

  After the war, number 2419 was returned to regular service with W-L, albeit briefly, on a couple of excursion trains running from Gare de l’Est. There might have been an opportunity for one or two playboys, making small talk over the hors d’oeuvres, to say, ‘Did you know, darling, that the Armistice that ended the war was signed in this very carriage? Waiter! Another gin and tonic, please!’ But the French woke up to the significance of the carriage, and it was exhibited in Les Invalides in Paris, where it looked rather embarrassed, being an essentially frivolous object, to be displayed behind a guard of honour of a dozen cannons. In 1927, it was returned to the hallowed spot in the forest, the location now given the fate-temptingly tranquil name: the Glade of the Armistice.

  On 22 June 1940, Hitler had the carriage moved back to exactly the original signing place, and the Armistice with defeated France was signed in it at 3pm on that day. Number 2419 was then taken to Berlin, and exhibited in the Lustgarten. In his Berlin Diary, the American journalist William Shirer wrote, on 8 July 1940, ‘The historic Pullman car [not quite right] of Marshal Foch arrived in Berlin today. Pending final arrangements it will be placed in the Anhalter freight depot.’ The roof of Anhalter Station collapsed after a bombing raid of late November 1943. In her 1968 memoir The Past is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg described how ‘propaganda posters hung unnoticed in red and black tatters from the shrapnelpitted walls … the windowless trains … carried a rudderless crowd of soldiers, civilians, refugees and evacuees along diverse routes to uncertain destinations’. A raid of February 1945 reduced the station to something not much more substantial than its present condition.

  At about this time – the chronology is unclear – the carriage was moved to the small town of Crawinkel. When an American armoured column entered Crawinkel, an SS detachment set 2419 ablaze to stop it being used for another armistice, which would have put the French two–one up. Parts of the carriage survived the fire and were returned to the Glade of the Armistice, where they are exhibited together with an exact replica of 2419, built in 1950.


  Car number 2419 was tussled over because it had been the venue for the signing of a document. But it also happens to have been, like any Wagons-Lits car, a symbol of peace, or at least of international cooperation. Since we are speaking of documents being signed, let us remember that, before the first Orient Express could run, contracts had to be struck between Wagons-Lits and the Eastern Railway Company of France, the Imperial Railways in Alsace-Lorraine, the Grand Duchy of Baden State Railways, the Royal Württemberg State Railways, the Kingdom of Bavaria Lines of Communication, the Royal Imperial Office for the Operation of State Railways at Vienna, the Imperial and Royal Austrian State Railways and the Royal Rumanian Railways. That the company’s long-distance trains were necessarily sleepers increased their romance, but did not necessarily add to their virtue. Today, sleeper trains do seem virtuous. They are better for the environment than their rivals, the high-speed trains and the aeroplanes.

  They do not make money, however, so their future looks uncertain in Western Europe. But my Swedish correspondent, who wished to remain nameless (‘I have no need for crediting,’ as he put it), concluded his potted history of the Berlin Night Express with a surprisingly severe injunction: ‘It may be off topic, but a book about European night trains must not end pessimistic.’

  Well, here goes. As already mentioned, Austrian Railways, ÖBB, will take over some of the sleepers given up on by Deutsche Bahn, which ought not to be too surprising. After all, why would Austria, located in the centre of Europe, give up on sleeper trains? As I came to the end of writing this book, I had a conversation with a man who works as an analyst at a London bank. Admittedly, he is a rail-enthusiast, but he is always governed by the balance sheets: ‘Night trains?’ he said. ‘Oh, they’ll survive somehow. I mean, it’s a no-brainer. Travel increases all the time; planes will never be allowed to fly between midnight and 6am because of noise – and you save a hotel bill.’ If Paris is no longer the ‘ompahalos’, the baton has been passed to Moscow. In 2009 Russian state railways, RZD, commissioned 200 sleeping cars from the German firm Siemens. These are mainly for domestic use, but sleepers run from Moscow to Vienna, Cheb, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow and Helsinki, among other European cities, and the list would be longer were it not for the Ukraine crisis. I have mentioned the Moscow-Nice and Moscow-Paris sleepers, and there are suggestions at the time of writing that the Russians might yet go beyond loaning a couple of carriages to the Paris-Nice Intercité de Nuit. The rumour is that they might bid to run all of the surviving, apparently doomed, French sleepers. When asked about the Russian rationale, one railway journalist replied, ‘It’s a putting-up-two-fingers thing,’ which made sense: Russia propping up a European institution, and gaining the kudos that comes from operating night trains.