Running out of steam
As Britain tumbles out of Europe, it is sadly fitting that an enterprise we once helped to prop up should also be disappearing over the horizon.
In a scrupulously detailed elegy to a once revolutionary mode of transport that has fallen prey to the age of convenience, journalist and railway anorak Andrew Martin reluctantly rang the death knell for the European sleeper train earlier this year.
Night Train: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper sees its monolingual author ride what is left of the continent’s depleted sleeper network either side of the Brexit vote. In the process, he is exposed to the enduringly telegenic dangers and fading delights associated with closing your eyes in one country and waking up in another.
But the long goodbye of the night train is no fringe event, nor is the despondency it engenders the exclusive reserve of eccentric loners clutching dog-eared railway timetables. As one of the sleeper’s many patrons, I will not be alone in lamenting the passing of a European institution quite literally freighted with a heady mix of stout tradition and intoxicating uncertainty.
Now for a confession: my first, and presumably last, dalliance with a bona fide sleeper was over two years ago. Little did we know it at the time, but when my friend and I stepped through the gathering dusk of the Vienna station platform onto a train bound for Venice, we were almost certainly joining a service from Paris dating back to the late nineteenth century. What appeared to our island imaginations a feat tantamount to teleportation was merely the last heave of a twilight swing across Western Europe; we were just two more wide-eyed Interrailers thumbing a lift.
In a last-minute impulse of parsimony, I had insisted we swap the bed in the private berth we had booked for a bog-standard seat in a public compartment, albeit one with exceptionally roomy luggage racks. However, my momentary pride at having resisted the siren call of luxury in favour of more spartan living quarters was soon erased by the sight of my friend uncomfortably spread-eagled across the bench opposite in a valiant bid for sleep. Dawn eventually broke over the causeway connecting Venice with the Italian mainland, assailing my bloodshot eyes with piercing sunlight as we coaxed our aching limbs onto the forecourt of Santa Lucia station at the water’s edge. The gondolas plying back and forth on the Grand Canal thrummed with a momentarily alien vigour.
No thanks to me, we hadn’t done it right. Wagons-lits, once so much in common parlance among the British travelling classes that you could be forgiven for not recognising it as a French word denoting a Belgian railway company, were supposed to replicate home comforts. In fact, they often went further, not least within the tinkling confines of the fabled dining car. The status of France as the continent’s gastronomic benchmark before which the rest of us instinctively genuflect must owe much to the haute-cuisine on offer at these mobile restaurants, where the introduction of three-course menus between the wars was seen as a regrettable economy.
Just shy of two years after my Venetian expedition, I was standing on a sand dune somewhere in the middle of the North Sea island of Sylt in the torrential rain. My head full of romantic visions of sunset crossings, I had elected to take the train from Hamburg straight after work. It being February, I had instead arrived in the pitch black and I was struggling to pick out my hostel through the maritime murk. Officially, I was there for a solitary 24-hour running escape, but my disappointment when darkness fell before we had even reached Husum, North Sea poet Theodor Sturm’s ‘grey town by the sea’ in northernmost Schleswig-Holstein, told me my anticipation had been as much about the journey as the destination.
Fortunately, the trip had delivered on the other promise of long-haul train journeys: fleeting kinship with complete strangers. These stolen encounters thrive on the liberating contrast they present to the stiff exchanges that pass for everyday conversation. Caught like us in a world apart, our fellow passengers have a knack for casting off the formal shackles of polite society and confiding in their neighbours before duty reasserts itself at the end of the line. My lot that night was to be corralled into an amiably one-sided heart-to-heart with a disarmingly sociable Bulgarian who flattened the language barrier between us with the sheer force of his desire to be understood. Via a combination of his urgent hand gestures and percussive repetition of a limited stock of German and English nouns, I learned that he hoped to settle permanently in Germany with his fluent wife and their child. He was a waiter in Westerland, the island capital to which he commuted every morning across the Hindenburgdamm I would later traverse myself.
On an eight-hour train ride from Lille to Barcelona three years earlier, it had first dawned on me that neglecting to talk to your travelling companions would actually be considered rude. A far cry from the tacit omertà in force on the London Underground, a silent European train carriage is a disconcerting anomaly. It is also a wasted opportunity. Having restricted myself for the first half of that French odyssey to the forbidding company of novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and an obscenely large baguette, I succumbed to the benign overtures of a retired Parisian man as the flat northern plains gave way to the Alps. Having grown tired of the relentless pace of the city his compatriots know simply as le monde, he had withdrawn with his pension to the Mediterranean backwater of Sète, a town best known for its annual water jousting tournament. By the time he alighted, we were firmly in Pyrenean territory. His last act had been to point out a flock of pink flamingos clustering around a watering hole in the distance, the last of the summer sun glinting off their wing feathers.
Alone again, I could contemplate what is arguably the European Union’s supreme achievement. The whimsical pensioner’s replacement, a soldier home on leave from a peacekeeping assignment in Mali, had got out at Perpignan, leaving me to cross the Spanish border in splendid isolation. Once upon a time, this transition would have been encumbered with border checks by mistrustful officials with an inveterate suspicion of lone riders. Indeed, of all the blows inflicted on the European project over the past couple of years, the blithe violation of the Schengen agreement implied by the return of armed border patrols to Austria and Hungary has been among the bitterest pills to swallow.
After all, the humble train is still the most natural means of exploration. Unlike the whiff of invasion that clings to any arrival by plane, entering another country by rail is automatically more conciliatory than hurrying from an aircraft into a shuttle bus designed to whisk you straight to some gated hotel complex. Trains also go further faster than the ever expanding fleet of FlixBus coaches currently undercutting its more storied rival with prices as eye-catching as its carbon footprint. The suspense attendant upon waking to a dramatically altered landscape only glimpsed in outline as darkness fell, mingled with disbelief at the abrupt nature of your displacement, creates a thrill of disorientation that for some is more than half the point of going away in the first place.
Or it did. The same friend who had made the best of it on the sleeper to Venice was also an occasional passenger on the night train from Paris to Munich, where we were both studying at the time. While reading Night Train, I discovered with a jolt that it had outlived his custom by mere months. For those of us whose hopes and dreams have Europe at their heart, time may be running out in more ways than one.
