A Book of Railway Journeys
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About A Book of Railway Journeys
About Ludovic Kennedy
About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
For Alastair
in the hope that he will come
to enjoy trains as much
as his father has.
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Introduction
BRITAIN
The first railway journey
ANON
The Nineteenth Century
ROY FULLER
For and against the railway train
VARIOUS
Liverpool to Manchester, 1830
ANON
Manchester to Liverpool, 1835
CHARLES YOUNG
From a Railway Carriage
R. L. STEVENSON
Lackadaisical attitude of early passengers
W. M. ACWORTH
From Marlborough to West Wales
H. SANDHAM
Brimstone fumes and Irish Mary
REV. F. KILVERT
Lord Gormanston’s Nanny
ANON
The Railway Junction
WALTER DE LA MARE
An English hobo
ANON
Midnight on the Great Western
THOMAS HARDY
A botanical specimen found on the Great Western
ANON
The Wasp
JOHN DAVIDSON
Escape of a murderer
JOHN PENDLETON
Uncertainty of place of birth
ANON
Travelling to my second marriage on the day of the first moonshot
ROBERT NYE
A lunatic at large
RICHARD BENTLEY
Cook’s first tour
THOMAS COOK
The Spiritual Railway
ANON
Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class
JOHN BETJEMAN
A writer’s odyssey
NEVILLE CARDUS
Adlestrop
EDWARD THOMAS
Mr. Dombey
PATRICIA BEER
On the Footplate:
1. The Scotch Express
STEPHEN CRANE
Railway Note
EDMUND BLUNDEN
On the Footplate:
2. The Flying Scotsman
ERIC GILL
Night Mail
W. H. AUDEN
The Boy in the Train
M. C. SMITH
A journey to school
JAMES LEES-MILNE
The Everlasting Percy
E. V. KNOX
The Whitsun Weddings
PHILIP LARKIN
EUROPE
The Orient Express
1. Inaugural journey
MARTIN PAGE
2. A royal engine driver
MARTIN PAGE
3. Lack of catering
PAUL THEROUX
Restaurant Car
LOUIS MACNEICE
4. A view from the window
PAUL THEROUX
To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train
FRANCIS CORNFORD
The Fat White Woman Speaks
G. K. CHESTERTON
With Zola to visit Flaubert and Maupassant at Rouen
E. AND J. GONCOURT
Another visitor to Rouen
WILLIAM MORRIS
A Trip to Paris and Belgium
D. G. ROSSETTI
Dickens at Calais
CHARLES DICKENS
Lenin goes home
EDMUND WILSON
The Englishman abroad
MARTIN PAGE
Dawn
RUPERT BROOKE
Lord Curzon’s valet
HAROLD NICOLSON
Night train to Spain
EDWARD HUTTON
Courier’s train
ANTHONY CARSON
A mystery in Lapland
TERRY GREENWOOD
U.S.A.
The DeWitt Clinton
ROBERT N. WEBB
Limited
CARL SANDBURG
Across the plains
R. L. STEVENSON
The City of New Orleans
STEVE GOODMAN
Dickens in America
CHARLES DICKENS
The Lackawanna Railroad
STEPHEN GALE
How they started
1. Thomas Edison
THOMAS EDISON
2. George Pullman
JERVIS ANDERSON
Adventures of a hobo
W. H. DAVIES
Private varnish
LUCIUS BEEBE
This Train
ANON
The Making of the President 1968
1. Bobby Kennedy returns to Washington
THEODORE WHITE
2. Nixon at Deshler
THEODORE WHITE
Mr. and Mrs. Pitman
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
The trains in Maine
E. B. WHITE
I like to see it lap the miles
EMILY DICKINSON
Wendy in Zen
PAUL THEROUX
The heart of the matter
JOHN CHEEVER
U.S.S.R.
The Trans-Siberian Express
1. Tsar Alexander gives the go-ahead
2. The first train
MARTIN PAGE
3. The beginnings of Gulag—an early passenger remembers
ANON
4. An exchange of gifts
ROGERS E. M. WHITAKER AND ANTHONY HISS
5. The dining-car
PETER FLEMING, MICHAEL PENNINGTON, PAUL THEROUX
6. Some secret bridges
ERIC NEWBY
7. Some assorted drunks
PAUL THEROUX
8. The Red Army with its trousers down
ERIC NEWBY
9. A storm in Siberia
ERIC NEWBY
10. The Vostok
ERIC NEWBY
To a Locomotive in Winter
WALT WHITMAN
The ordeal of Gladys Aylward, missionary
ALAN BURGESS
Travelling to Samarkand
1. Lord Curzon
KENNETH ROSE
2. Peter Fleming
PETER FLEMING
In the Gulag Archipelago
1. Marie Avinov
PAUL CHAVCHAVADZE
2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN 184
ELSEWHERE
India
1. In the days of the Raj
JAN MORRIS
2. The Grand Trunk Express
PAUL THEROUX
Iran before the Ayahtollahs
LUDOVIC KENNEDY
An unusual death in Africa
J. H. PATTERSON
Australia
1. Across the Outback
MARK TWAIN
2. The Ghan Express
WILFRID THOMAS
Out of the Window
ALDOUS HUXLEY
A Chinese train
W. H. AUDEN AND CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
WAR
Hitler’s train
DAVID IRVING
A London evacuee
CHRISTOPHER LEACH
The Final Solution
SALA PAWLOWICZ WITH KEVIN KLOSE
An escape in Canada
KENDAL BURT AND JAMES LEASOR
Troop Train
KARL SHAPIRO
Capture of an ammunition train
PETER FLEMING
An English girl in Hitler’s Germany
CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG
Kindness to a prisoner of war
MILES REID
The courage of Driver Gimbert
ROGER LLOYD
The Send-off
WILFRED OWEN
CRASHES
Therapeutic benefits of a crash...
ANON
Social benefits of a crash...
ANON
Preventative measures in a crash...
ANON
A curious encounter between two John Perkins
ANON
George Alley
ANON
Dickens in danger
CHARLES DICKENS
Collision at Thorpe
C. F. ADAMS
The Ashtabula disaster, 1876
C. F. ADAMS
Casey Jones
WALLACE SAUNDERS
A crash in Palestine
FREDERICK TREVES
The Trans-Siberian takes a purler
PETER FLEMING
The Tay Bridge disaster
A. J. CRONIN
FICTION
A cargo of cheeses
JEROME K. JEROME
The coming of the milk-girl
MARCEL PROUST
Faintheart in a Railway Train
THOMAS HARDY
Death of a hobo
JOHN DOS PASSOS
On the trail of the thief
ERICH KASTNER
Mr. Boot and Mr. Salter
EVELYN WAUGH
Train without driver
EMILE ZOLA
The Little Black Train
KENNETH PATCHEN
Holmes and Moriarty: The Final Problem
A. CONAN DOYLE
The very silent traveller
PAUL TABORI
The workman and the wet-nurse
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
Journey
HAROLD MONRO
Train to Johannesburg
ALAN PATON
The great race east
RUDYARD KIPLING
The story-teller
SAKI
Incident in August
BRYAN MORGAN
Ethel and Mr Salteena go to Rickamere Hall
DAISY ASHFORD
Love on the Orient Express
GRAHAM GREENE
Sources and Acknowledgments
About A Book of Railway Journeys
About Ludovic Kennedy
About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Introduction
Trains are on the way back; if not in substance, at least in the imagination. Mr. Paul Theroux may be said to have started the revival with The Great Railway Bazaar, a fascinating account of his travels by train from London to Tokyo and back. Recently in Paris the French staged a vast railway station exhibition, Le Temps des Gares; while in New York and London there have been revivals of the musical On the Twentieth Century based on America’s former crack express of the same name. The BBC has completed a seven-part series of television documentaries entitled Great Railway Journeys of the World, and Britain has also been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. Illustrated descriptions of train journeys are now a feature of colour magazines; and railway clubs, private branch lines, special excursions, etc., are, I am told, all in rude health.
For some of us, of course, trains never went away. My own affection for them began as a small boy when travelling to the Scottish Highlands for summer holidays before the war. Then, as now, the delight lay in the unaccustomed break with routine—the bustle of the terminus, porters jostling for the bags; stocking up with literature and chocolate at the platform stalls; then, settled in, the long, sweet wait for the whistle and the slow inching forward to the north. Dinner and a fitful sleep, and in the morning a bedside window on another world: deer on the hillside, wind on the heather, the heart of Scotland at my feet.
Since then I have travelled in trains whenever possible. My favourite was the Terra Nova, the private car of the Governor of Newfoundland, whose private secretary and A.D.C. I once briefly was. The Governor and his wife slept in the car’s two bedrooms: in the drawing room-cum-observation car the butler and I slung hammocks from the roof. For official visits and fishing holidays the Terra Nova was hitched to the rear of the Newfoundland Express, which went at all of thirty miles an hour; and sustained by the Governor’s pink gins (for he was also an admiral) and by the butler’s pepper steaks (for he was also the cook) and the grandeur of the Newfoundland scenery, we pottered contentedly across the island to wherever duty or pleasure called.
In the days when train travel was the norm, we were all rather inclined to take it for granted. After a thirty-year glut of jet and motorway travel, the novelty of which has long since worn off, we can see that train travel was—and when you can get it, still is—comparative bliss. No one who has travelled long distances on a motorway, chained like a dog to his seat, unable to read or drink, blocked by juggernauts from the passing view, deafened by their engines and blackened by their fumes, would wish to repeat the experience for pleasure.
Air travel is little better. One is cramped and disorientated. Chains are de rigueur here too; and if you happen to find yourself next to a manic child or compulsive chatterbox, there is little you can do to escape. Airlines attempt to compensate for these deficiencies with piped music, films, and instant alcohol. These overload the system and, combined with a swingeing time-change, lead to total dysfunction; arriving within hours of setting out, one needs two days to recover.
Train journeys, in comparison, have much to offer. Unlike sea or air travel, one has a fair notion where one is; and the countryside, like a moving picture show, unrolls itself before one’s eyes. One is transported in comfort, even style, to the wild places of earth—forest, mountain, desert; and always there is the counterpoint between life within the train and life without:
One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:—
Three Indians in the scouring drouth,
huddled at a grave scooped in the gravel,
lean to the wind as our train goes by.
Someone is gone.
There is dust on everything in Nevada.
I pour the cream.*1
One can move around in a train, visit the buffet for snacks or a drink, play cards (or, on some American trains, the piano), strike up a conversation, read, sleep, snore, make love. Luggage is to hand too, not as in car or airplane, ungetatable in trunk or belly.
Some trains are designed to satisfy national needs. The American club car, for instance, exists for passengers to bore each other with accounts of business deals, marital problems, extramarital affairs: the price they know they must pay is to be bored in turn later. The English have never gone in for club cars, believing that on long journeys one should not utter at all. When buffet cars were first introduced to British trains, there was a real danger they might lead to social intercourse. Happily they turned out to be so utterly bereft of comfort and style, so perennially awash in soldiers and beer, as to discourage any right-thinking person from staying a moment longer than the time needed for his purchase, which he is then free to convey to the privacy and silence of his seat.
Yet the sweetest pleasure of any long train journey lies in its anticipation. I have never eyed any long-distance train I was about to board (except perhaps in Britain) without wondering, as the old hymn says of Heaven,
What joys await us there?
What radiancy of glory?
What bliss beyond compare?
Even if achievement rarely matches promise, one may still day-dream. How green are the vistas, what’s for dinner, whom shall I meet? In the end it’s the passengers who provide the richest moments of any long-distance trip. For train travel, being constricted both in time and space, magnifies character, intensifies relationships, unites the disparate. Ordinary people become extra-ordinary, larger than life; and in the knowledge that they
will not meet again, expansive, confiding, intimate. Let us talk now, you and I: later will be too late.
In the pages that follow, the reader will find many such brief encounters: the Rev. Francis Kilvert and Irish Mary; Harold Nicolson and Arketall; myself and Mr. and Mrs. Pitman; Christabel Bielenberg and the S.S. officer; Paul Theroux and Wendy. In the fiction section the meetings are even stranger: Myatt and Carol in Stamboul Train; the general and his companion in The Very Silent Traveller; the workman and the wet-nurse in Maupassant’s An Idyll. No wonder that trains are so often the setting for stories, for the essential stuff of stories—movement and relationships—is also the stuff of trains.