Night Trains Read online

  At 00.20, we came to Mo i Rana, a wide, low town – the second largest in Nordland, after Bodø – illuminated by orange lights. In the mid-1950s, a big steel industry was developed here on the basis of local iron ore, and what had been a village of a thousand people became a town of 20,000. The importance of the railway to this process is shown by the existence of a Mo i Rana freight terminal, and a siding serving an industrial park, where things are now more ‘diversified’, with new service industries. In 1951, the Norwegian government planned to disinter from the vicinity of Mo (as the place is known) the corpses of Russian prisoners of war, who had died during the building of the railway, but the project was abandoned after a mass protest by 800 Norwegians. Some or all of this sadness is expressed in an Antony Gormley artwork, erected in 1994, in the shallows of the Ranfjord on which Mo i Rana stands: Havmann (meaning ‘man from the sea’) is eleven metres high – therefore visible for a long time from the train – and shows every sign of wanting to wade out to his death. The melancholia is compounded by the fact that Gormley had wanted to make the statue from steel, but the steelworks had just closed down.

  That protest at Mo should be seen as part of a wider picture. In 1951, 8,000 other Russian corpses were collected from ninety graves along the northern part of the Nordland, and ‘reassembled’ in a central cemetery in Helgeland, Nordland, as part of ‘Operation Asphalt’. The expressed rationale was that the graves could be better looked after in a central location, but Operation Asphalt owed something to Cold War animosities.

  At one o’clock, I walked back to my bunk, which meant walking through the carriage for seated sleeping. The NSB Sove literature says, ‘If you choose to travel in an ordinary seat on the night trains, we offer you a special package containing a pillow, travel blanket, eye mask and ear plugs. You are welcome to take the package home with you. If not, the blankets are donated to charity.’ Whereas everyone in that carriage was asleep (including the socks-and-sandals man) I spent the next hour and a half lying awake on my bunk, watching the landscape and the light. I dozed a little from about half past three, thereby missing our stop at Namsskogan, where we crossed with the night train going in the opposite direction, and here – with Norwegian rationality – the crews apparently swapped over, to avoid being taken too far from their homes.

  At 4.55am, I was woken by a rapid rattle on the line. Looking at my map, I saw that the rattle might have been made by our going over a steel bridge at a place called Jørstadelva. The Norwegian Resistance repeatedly attacked the Nordland Railway when the Germans took it over, and the most spectacular act of sabotage, Operation Woodlark, was carried out in January 1945 at Jørstadelva Bridge. The National Military Museum, located in a courtyard behind Trondheim Cathedral, shows how it was done, with displays of detonators and fuses. The target was a troop train heading south, and two Norwegians were killed (the driver and the fireman), together with seventy-eight German soldiers, and 200 horses. The current bridge at Jørstadelva must therefore post-date 1945. Incidentally, while the National Military Museum details acts of sabotage by the Resistance, it makes no attempt to finesse the extent of Norwegian collaboration: ‘Many Norwegians served in the German armed forces. Between 15,000 and 20,000 volunteered but only 6,000 were accepted. The majority served in the Waffen SS on the eastern front, or in Finland. After the war they were tried and convicted as traitors.’

  Returning to the buffet, I ordered a coffee and a snack that turned out to be sugary bread and cinnamon – just what was needed. The Australian woman had departed, but possibly not long since, because the bottle of red had not been cleared from her table, and there was a quarter bottle of the same next to it. At 5.40am, at Steinkjer, the strange, small man from Bodø got off. I waved vigorously through the window at him, but he didn’t look my way. The golden light was now entirely magical; a man was rowing a small boat across the completely flat, pinkish waters of the Trondheim Fjord. Not including people at railway stations, he was about the sixth human being I’d seen from the Nordland Railway day and night trains combined. (And two of those six had waved at the train.) We had now begun threading through the farmsteads again, perhaps serving as an alarm clock to the inhabitants.

  We arrived at Trondheim on the dot of 07.17 and the small crowd disembarking from the train soon dispersed, including the Australian woman. (A Goth on a bicycle had been politic enough to turn up and meet her.) Stepping from the station, I seemed to have the city to myself. It was Sunday morning, but too early for church bells. The canal water might have been blue glass; traffic lights changed irrelevantly. I was armed with a brochure that had been placed in my compartment, advising me that, on production of my train ticket, the Best Western Hotel would provide me with a cheap breakfast.

  The lobby of the hotel was made to seem dark by the brightness of the morning. I asked the young man at reception, ‘Do you do breakfast for train people?’

  ‘Sure!’ he said, after a brief pause, and rather in the tone of someone saying, ‘Why the hell not?’

  It was an excellent breakfast in any case.

  HELL REVISITED

  At Trondheim Airport, with three hours to kill before my flight back to London, I recalled the closeness of the airport to the village of Hell. So I stepped out of the terminal.

  After a few minutes of walking through an anonymous terrain of light industry, a forested bank appeared. Within the trees were tall white letters, slightly askew like their Hollywood equivalent, spelling ‘HELL’. The railway track was beneath, with a river adjacent. A rough road of white stone led towards Hell Station.

  The name seemed highly inappropriate – indeed, ironic – because Hell has all the features one would like to find in a railway station. The station clock works. There is extensive free parking and a well-designed and secure lock-up facility for bikes – not that there can be much crime in Hell. The station, bathed just then in bright afternoon sunlight, serves half a dozen large, attractive, timber-framed houses, peacefully arranged around a small green. A positively angelic-looking child creaked backwards and forwards on a swing located in the centre of this green, and she watched with interest as I approached the main station building, which is painted a pretty mustard colour. A sign helpfully pointed out that Hell is 3.9 metres above sea level. The station building itself was locked and shuttered, but one dusty window disclosed the first hint of self-consciousness about the name: a plastic devil mask, together with a devil’s trident and a ‘Ghostface’ mask associated with the film Scream. It was like looking into the rummage room of a fancy-dress supplier.

  The waiting for trains no longer takes place in this building, but in a nearby structure similar to a bus shelter. Two sleepy-looking teenage boys sat on the bench inside, meditatively prodding at their smartphones. Here was my opportunity to join an honourable tradition of British travel …

  ‘North of Trondheim,’ somebody wrote in Railway Wonders of the World in 1935, ‘there is a small junction known as Hell – to which the facetious Englishman, alas, has a fondness for buying a ticket, so that he may display it to his friends on the return home.’

  Obviously one has to move with the times, and the modern equivalent of a ticket in one’s railway scrapbook is an image on one’s electronic device. I would ask these boys to photograph me in front of the station sign, which would enable me to put the photo online, over an amusing caption such as: ‘Here’s me in Hell!’ or, ‘They told me to go to hell, so I did!’

  The boys turned out to be the first Norwegians I’d met who did not speak fluent English. It was possible they had almost no English, but one of the two got the message that I wanted my photograph taken, so I took up a position directly adjacent to the station name, and handed over my iPad. I posed; the boy frowned, indicating that I should step forward a little way. He pressed the button, and I thanked him as he handed back the iPad. He returned to the bus shelter, and I inspected the photograph. It was quite a good one of me (for once) but the boy had not included the station sign. I was obliged to s
ummon him again. When he emerged, somewhat reluctantly, from the bus shelter, I explained in slow English that I had been hoping he would picture me alongside the word ‘Hell’. ‘It’s a joke, you see?’ I urged. He frowned – he was turning out to be rather good at frowning. But he agreed to take another shot, and this time I indicated that he should not return to the bus shelter until I had inspected the result … which was excellent, in that it looked like all the other thousands of pictures taken at this place. The boy rejoined his companion, giving a brief, baffled shake of the head. A train was now approaching – it was not loco hauled, like the star turn of the line, the Nordland, but rather a perfunctory two-car diesel multiple unit.

  I walked away as it drew up to the platform, and no doubt my departure from the station just as the train arrived would have merited another shake of the head between the two boys. But I did not turn around to check. I had a plane – not a train – to catch, and my very satisfactory engagement with the Nordland Railway was ended.

  3

  PARIS-VENICE

  TRAVELLING TO THE BATTLEFIELDS?

  As I waited for the night train to Venice, the Gare de Lyon – that outpost of the Riviera – was not its usual exuberant self. The station was cold on this November evening, and darkness seemed to seep in from outside. Armed soldiers in camouflage gear stood around on the concourse and platforms; the crowd below the departure screens was wary and quiet, and the screen was not giving much away: usually, the words ‘à l’heure’ appeared where I expected a departure time, including in the case of the 19.13 to Venice, operated by a company called Thello.

  On the previous Friday, supporters of Islamic State had murdered 130 people on the streets of Paris, including 89 at the Bataclan nightclub. A state of emergency was in operation, and the entire city was subdued. There’d been no trouble getting a seat on the Métro all day, and at lunchtime, the giant Bateaux Mouches had been sliding under the Pont Neuf, with only half a dozen people on board.

  During the misty, quiet afternoon, I had walked along the Viaduc des Arts, just north of the station. This is now walkway and linear garden, with many exotic plants, and quite a few rats. Until 1969 – when it lost its passenger traffic to RER Line A – the viaduct carried a suburban railway from Vincennes and the suburbs of eastern Paris to Gare de la Bastille, the smallest and most obscure Parisian terminus, which was at its busiest in the 1930s. After years of decline, the station was earmarked for a railway museum, but it was demolished in 1984 to make way for the Bastille Opera House. But the locale of Bastille was more operatic during the lifetime of the station, which – besides its hordes of commuters, alighting from double-decker steam trains – received exotic cargoes, originally in the form of wine from the vineyards of the Marne Valley, and then – when the wine growers saw more profit in flowers – from roses. In the summer of 1897 a nocturnal Train des Roses carried a million blooms every night to the Gare de la Bastille.

  ***

  I had bought the euros for my trip from the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International three days after the Paris attack. That station too was full of armed police, and my visit coincided with a minute’s silence for the victims. A notice had been pasted onto the window of the ticket office: ‘Travelling to the Battlefields? If you are planning to visit the World War One sites in France or Belgium, please ask a Eurostar staff member for some very important information before you travel.’ Alongside the notice was a picture of a bomb with a red line through it, and this was all to do with the dangers of picking up old and possibly unexploded shells from muddy fields, but it seemed that all Eurostar passengers would be travelling to the battlefields.

  The booking of my ticket, a month before, had also been a glum affair. I had gone to the elegant Voyages SNCF premises on Piccadilly. (‘Your experts in High-Speed European Rail, Eurostar, Overnight Trains, Interrail and European Passes, Ski Trains and Auto Trains.’) It occupies no. 157, which used to be known as French Railways House, and has long been the London home of SNCF. The place was empty, so there was no need to take a numbered ticket and wait for a consultant: one was immediately available.

  I explained that I wanted to go from Paris to Venice on the Thello night train, and gave the date. The woman asked if that was the only date I was interested in. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because it’s the full moon.’ She looked at me suspiciously. ‘It’s for the views as we go through the Alps,’ I said. She began making the booking on her own tablet rather than using the PC on the desk. She said something about how she was not making the booking through the usual channels of the Voyages SNCF office. This was a shame, because there ought to be a railway travel agency on such a grand, cosmopolitan street as Piccadilly. Thomas Cook used to have one of its offices there.

  I thought of all the places where I had formerly bought international railway tickets that had now closed: my local travel agent in North London; the offices of a Belgian company called Wasteels in Victoria Station; a little office of South Eastern Trains behind Cannon Street Station – and that must have been a long time ago, because I remember one woman looking up from her typewriter when I walked in.

  The one I would most sorely have missed, though, had I ever used it, was the Wagons-Lits company’s London headquarters in Cockspur Street, SW1. The Continental Traveller magazine gives the company’s London HQ as 14 Cockspur Street, with additional booking offices at 36 Leadenhall Street, ‘inside the Hotel Cecil’, and Charing Cross and Victoria Stations. That was in the 1890s. The 14 Cockspur Street of today is a different building, worth a digression as indicating the nature of the street, which in London terms is an anonymous, if stately, conduit between Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square, but whose true significance is international.

  The present day no. 14 was built in 1906 for the Hamburg-America Line, a German shipping company. In the early twentieth century, their ship, the Deutschland, won the Blue Riband on three occasions for the fastest Atlantic crossing. The building is decorated with two carved figures holding what appear to be model ships, and these are believed to be Deutschland, and another of the company’s ships, Amerika (hence the eagle standing next to the figure). The fall of Icarus is also depicted – a bit of scaremongering directed at anyone who might think that aeroplanes would soon be the way to go. After the First World War, the building was seized by the British government from the Hamburg-America Line, for reparations, after which the shipping line P&O moved in. New decorations were added, including caryatids on either side of the main entrance, one representing Britain, the other ‘The East’. On his architectural website Ornamental Passions, Chris Partridge writes, ‘I love the way that Britannia stands in a strong, confident but no-nonsense stance, whereas the dusky oriental lovely has a slight but sensuous swing to the hips.’ Above the door is the P&O motto: Quis Separabit? (‘Who will separate us?’). If my decoding of the Edwardian Post Office Directory for London is correct, Wagons-Lits, billed as ‘Sleeping Car Company (International)’, moved to the only slightly less grand, and rather Gothic, 20 Cockspur Street in 1906, where it flourished – presumably, since no. 20 was built especially for it – alongside its globalised Cockspur neighbours, such as the White Star Line, the Cunard Steamship Company, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco, Henry Martin Snow (Passenger Agent), the Great Northern Railway of America and the Union Pacific Railway. In 1929, Wagons-Lits moved again to 20 St James’s Street, a much-messed-about block that today houses some gents’ outfitters and gives no clue to its former identity. When Wagons-Lits acquired Thomas Cook in 1928, the joint HQ was established in Berkeley Street, Mayfair. In 1973, 14 Cockspur Street was listed Grade II, at which time it had become a bank. In 2012, it became the Brazilian Embassy. After W-L moved, no. 20 Cockspur Street was taken over by the Grand Trunk Railway System of Canada, whose name adorns the top of the building, on the side facing Trafalgar Square. Today, the lower floors are occupied by a snare for tourists retailing Union Jack coffee mugs and the like.

  The Voy
ages SNCF consultant told me the telephone booking service would continue for a few more months, then it too would end. She then turned to the complicated Thello booking system, which she suggested might be regarded as a sort of bet. If you booked a place in a compartment assigned to three passengers, there was a chance you’d have to share with two other people. If you booked a two berth, there was a chance you’d have to share with another one. But if the trains proved to be undersubscribed, the risk of sharing was reduced, with the three berths being filled before the more expensive two berths.

  My three berth option cost £90.50. Taken together with a Eurostar ticket to Paris, the total cost was £170 for the one-way journey, more than twice as much as the cost of a return flight to Venice, which no doubt helps explain the closure of the Voyages SNCF office. ‘We’ve heard that Jamie Oliver’s bought the building,’ said the consultant. That figured. Never mind about trains, the modern Briton is like a snail: moves about on his stomach.4

  ***

  Tired of waiting for ‘l’heure’ on the freezing concourse of the Gare de Lyon, I repaired to the Train Bleu buffet, which was mentioned in the chapter about the train of that name. The main space is called the Gold Room, just in case anybody should think they might be able to buy a cheap snack. Oddly enough, there is something of the waiting room about it – in the bench-like seats of studded leather, surmounted by luggage racks (which are, admittedly, gold plated).

  I headed for the back room, where drinks are served. This used to look more railway-ish than it does today, having once been subdivided into compartment-like booths separated by heavy purple curtains. But the area has recently been refurbished in beige, and the effect has been created along one wall of a Moorish screen, which does tie in with the architecture of the station, especially the clock tower. Mindful of a review I’d once read in Time Out (‘a few reasonably priced wines would be welcome’) I ordered what appeared to be the cheapest and smallest option: a Chardonnay for eight euros. The Train Bleu cat – a ginger tabby – did me the honour of sitting down by my seat to lick its paws. The people around me were quietly engaged with their smartphones or laptops. I looked through the window towards the dark rooftops of the 12th arrondissement. The most striking feature was the green neon sign of a pharmacy. This always seems an anonymous district, as though intimidated by the overbearing glamour of the station, whose high white clock seems to replace the moon over this part of Paris.