Night Trains Read online

  THELLO

  A scruffy-looking rake of carriages waited on Platform A, and I approached it warily. This night train to Venice gets mixed reviews. Mark Smith, who heroically keeps Britons in touch with European trains via his admirable Man in Seat 61 website, says, ‘I so want to like Thello, but they don’t make it easy …’

  The livery is a jumble of white, blue, green and red. Perhaps it’s meant to combine the colours of the French and Italian flags, since the train is operated by Trenitalia (the Italian national operator) and a French private firm called Transdev, under the name Thello. It is branded a EuroNight service, and it is one of the few privately operated passenger trains to run through France. There is also the Venice-Simplon Orient Express (VSOE), a tourist train from Paris to Venice, with beautifully restored Wagons-Lits carriages of the Lx-class. The VSOE trades on the history of the Simplon Orient Express, which – running to Istanbul via the Simplon Tunnel and southern Europe – became the primary route of the Orient Express in the interwar period, overshadowing the plain Orient Express of 1883 vintage that continued to run from Gare de l’Est.

  The Thello train was interesting because it echoed the first part of that Simplon journey. It also echoes another Wagons-Lits service, the Rome Express. This began life in 1883 as the Calais-Nice-Rome Express, which went to Rome along the Riviera. A quicker route would have taken it through the Mont Cenis Tunnel, between Modane in France and Bardonecchia in Italy. That was open for business from 1871, but not to the Wagon-Lits company, because the Upper Italian Railway had struck an agreement with the American Pullman Palace Car Company whereby only Pullman sleepers could run through the tunnel. (As mentioned in the Introduction, the only European country in which the American Pullman company had established its sleepers in those early days was Italy.)

  In 1889, Wagons-Lits gained access to the tunnel, and the Rome Express began running in 1890. It went via Aixles-Bains, Turin, Genoa, Pisa and Florence. According to George Behrend, writing in Grand European Expresses, ‘The direct Orient Express is mysterious, the Blue Train is chic, the Sud Express is dignified, but the Rome Express is majestic.’ It certainly gives rise to one of his most majestic passages of prose, concerning the passengers of the late nineteenth century:

  They had enormous wardrobe trunks in the fourgon, and they stayed for months in Italy, sketching in Florence, or wintering unnoticed in Alessandria, masculine ladies with wispy hair, or mothers with grown-up daughters going for a protracted stay in Rome. The regulars were often known personally to the station interpreters, long-suffering men, whose life seemed akin to the retriever’s: lost trunks, lost people …

  Behrend also mentions that the Rome Express luncheon of the late 1890s included – alongside the Côtelettes de Mouton à la Mont Cenis – Petits Pois à l’Anglaise. ‘The fresh peas in November were possible by buying them in Brindisi from Corfu shippers and sending them specially to Calais on the Indian Mail.’

  A journey on the Rome Express was the object of many of the passengers on the smugly named Club Trains which ran from London to Dover between 1889 and 1893. One of these was run from Victoria by the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, over its main line via Chatham (which was known amongst railwaymen as ‘going up Chatham’). The other was run from Charing Cross by the South Eastern Railway over its main line, which went via Ashford. The first of these was a contracted operation with Wagons-Lits. The second was a spoiler. They both departed from London at 16.15, and they crossed en route to the coast at Chislehurst. Passengers from both trains boarded the same Channel steamer, and it was said that bored fishermen on Admiralty Pier at Dover would place bets on which would arrive first.

  The Rome Express was renamed the Palatino Express in 1969, by which time it was no longer a Wagons-Lits train, but operating as part of the TENPOOL. From 1995 the Palatino was operated by the Artesia Railway Company, a joint project of Trenitalia and SNCF. Artesia, and the train, ceased to exist in late 2011. It was briefly revived by Thello between December 2012 and December 2013, but today there is no sleeper to Rome. In fact, there are no direct trains from Paris to Rome at all. Even the high-speed services require a change at Milan or Turin. Nor is there any direct train from Paris to Venice, except the surviving Thello.

  The loco on the front was fitted with tri-current voltage, enabling it to run on the electrified lines of France, Switzerland and Italy. But this can-do engine is put to shame by the feeble extent of European rail integration of the ‘classic’ lines. Each country requires a different in-cab safety system, so we would be changing locos – probably at Vallorbe, after entering Switzerland through the Mont d’Or Tunnel, and at Domodossola, on entering Italy after the Simplon. An observer of the European railways told me, only half jokingly, that the national operators felt they might not get their engines back if they let them go into another country. Even though aviation causes ten times more pollution than conventional rail, the EU and its predecessors have done more to encourage aviation than railways, beginning with the deregulation of European air travel in 1997, which ushered in the budget airline boom. The aim of the EU has been to integrate its most far-flung populations, and places like Dublin and Stockholm can be more easily brought into the fold by cheap flights than cheap trains.

  It can now be assumed that a flight between any two countries will be cheaper than taking the train, whereas the opposite was once the case. The high-speed trains are particularly expensive. The slower trains, such as the sleepers, ought to be able to compete with the planes, but they are hampered by EU legislation, specifically Railway Directive 95/19 of 1995, which required a split between the train operators and the infrastructure providers. By this, the former must pay ‘track access charges’ to the latter. It seems an unnatural distinction to some. ‘All initial definitions of the railroad,’ wrote Wolfgang Schivelbusch in The Railway Journey, ‘unanimously describe it as a machine consisting of the rails and the vehicles running on them.’ In countries attached to the traditional, monolithic idea of railway nationalisation, such as France, the split is observed more by way of an accounting convention than a matter of having genuinely separate organisations. Even so, the measure shines a spotlight on the most heavily loss-making services – such as the sleepers – begging the question: ‘Are they worth paying the charges?’ But we British can’t blame the EU for the directive, because it represents the implementation of the British railway privatisation model, and it was the former Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, who, as Transport Commissioner, was behind the policy.

  Stepping aboard the Thello train, I was greeted by a friendly sleeping car conductor, who was either French or Italian, but spoke excellent English, and seemed to have a lot of time on his hands to talk to me. He agreed that business was slack; there had been many cancellations. ‘It’s because of what happened last week.’ I asked where we would be stopping, and after telling me ‘Dijon, Milan, Verona, Padua, Venice’ he ruefully added, ‘We should put up a notice because people often ask.’ He politely requested to see my ticket. ‘You are entitled to a free drink in the bar,’ he said, handing it back. ‘Also a free breakfast, because you are in first class.’ By this, he meant I was in a sleeper rather than a couchette. I wondered whether I would be having the compartment to myself. ‘I think so,’ he said, ‘unless someone gets on at Dijon.’ (But surely he must know whether somebody would be getting on at Dijon?)

  He asked for my passport – and it seemed he intended to keep it. That was always the way it worked in the heyday of Wagons-Lits, but its trains predated the Schengen agreement, whereas the countries we would be passing through – France, Switzerland and Italy – were all Schengen, so why did the conductor need my passport? ‘There have always been special arrangements for this train,’ he said, leaving open the possibility that additional special arrangements had been required in light of the current situation.

  The compartment looked washed out, with pale wood veneer and bright fluorescent light, like the hospital my father had recently died in, but there was
a certain solidity about it. After all, here was a Wagons-Lits berth. It was an MU-class, the last generation of Wagon-Lits sleepers, commenced in the late 1960s, with production continued in the 1970s by SNCF. ‘MU’ meant Modern Universal, and there was a note of desperation in the name, welcoming all comers to compartments that could be configured as single berth (for the thrusting Eurocrat), double (for the moneyed couple) or as a ‘three’ for students on a jolly. Chris Jackson, editor of the Railway Gazette International, told me that the trouble with the modern sleeper trains was that ‘They’ve lost the middle classes.’ The travellers are either nostalgists of a certain age, or young backpackers, and it has been this way for a while. Michael Barsley wrote in Orient Express (1966) that the train ‘should be preserved for two types: the student, for whom it is cheap, and the sentimentalist, for whom it is fun’.

  The MUs inherited by Thello have been refitted. According to Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61, ‘the refurb removed the civilised carpet and classy varnished-wood panelling decor, replacing it with grey synthetic flooring & off-white fascia that shows the dirt’. There was space for three bunks on one side, and only the top one had been made up, leaving room below for me to sit on the bench-like seat that would make up the bottom bunk if necessary. In the corner was a cabinet, harbouring a tiny sink, from the plug hole of which arose a ghostly roar. On the three racks above the sink were three small towels and soap bags corresponding to each of the possible bunks. The toilet bag was quite stylish: plastic, transparent and decorated with multiple Zs, suggesting deep slumber. Inside were a Thello toilet seat cover, a Thello handkerchief and not only Thello soap but also Thello liquid hand cleaner (‘No water or towel required’). There were Thello slippers – white towelling ones, like the kind you get in a good hotel – and a toothbrush and miniature toothpaste, about the size of a tube of Airfix glue. Scrutinising this, I was reminded of Cary Grant’s bemusement at picking up Eva Marie Saint’s tiny razor (‘No good for shaving a face’) in the sleeping car he is sharing with her in North by Northwest.

  I closed the cabinet door to banish the roaring, and now the compartment seemed sinisterly quiet. On the window was a symbol of a bottle with a red line through it – a warning not to throw bottles out of the window. The window was unopenable to the ordinary passenger in any case, the carriage being air-conditioned. (But it could have been opened by the use of one of those European railway master keys called a Berne key, introduced after a railway conference in that city in 1886, to permit host countries to access international trains passing through their territories.) Wagons-Lits carriages had a more verbose prohibition. ‘Travellers are reminded that Railway Officials and employees ON DUTY ON THE PERMANENT WAY are often seriously injured through different articles, such as bottles, glasses, empty tins, etc. being thrown out of the windows.’ In Our Iron Roads, published in 1883, F. S. Williams wondered which was the greater problem on British railways: passengers throwing bottles out of windows, or boys throwing stones at trains.

  We pulled into the grey railway gorge that serves Gare de Lyon. We were the only train on the twenty or so tracks, and so the loneliness of my compartment – and seemingly of the entire carriage – was compounded. After only a few minutes, there was nothing beyond the window but pure blackness, with no sign of the full moon that had been billed to appear.

  ***

  Time for the dining car. The conductor had offered to lock my compartment when I went for dinner, but there was nothing worth stealing if I took my wallet with me. I also took my book, The Passenger from Calais, by Major Arthur Griffiths, not that anyone would want to steal that.

  Arthur George Frederick Griffiths was a (fairly) enlightened prison administrator, who wrote the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on ‘Criminology’, but his later works on the subject, such as Criminals I Have Known (1895), were sensational, and on the cusp of fiction. He wrote more than sixty books, and The Passenger from Calais (1905) was the last of his novels. It begins with the protagonist, Lieutenant Colonel Basil Annesley, boarding the ‘Lucerne wagon-lit’ of the ‘Engadine express’. Griffiths is rather grudging with his capital letters, but from the mid-1890s the Wagons-Lits company did run an Engadine Express from Calais to various places in Switzerland, including Lucerne and Chur. Colonel Annesley becomes intrigued by an apparent ‘adventuress’ riding on the train. Being a purposeful man (‘I closed my Bradshaw with a bang, replaced it in my bag, drank up my coffee and started for the telegraph office’), he decides to pursue her through various baffling changes of train and tram on the Swiss-French border.

  At first the Colonel regrets his interest in the woman: ‘She was presumably an adventuress, clever, designing, desirous of turning me round her finger.’ Fortunately, ‘she was also a pretty woman’, and he realises she is in trouble in some way, which brings out the chivalrous side of his nature. He recruits the aid of a Swiss sleeping car attendant called l’Echelle, who is only too happy to become one of several ‘confidential agents’ flitting about in this labyrinthine tale. The attendant declares, ‘I fancy I have fallen into a snug berth, a soft job, better than making beds in a wagon-lit and being shaken to death in express trains.’ It is a very bad book indeed. Perfectly – or at least fairly – reasonable statements will be followed by, ‘he shouted with scornful laughter’.

  In 1896, Griffiths had written another ‘wagon-lit’ story, The Rome Express, which is the first of several fictions to be set aboard that Wagons-Lits train. In spite of featuring the sentence (if it is a sentence) ‘It was murder! murder most foul!’ this is a much better book, with a neat mystery at its heart concerning who was in what compartment when. But it seems an opportunity missed in that there isn’t much of either ‘Rome’ or the ‘Express’ in the book. The murder happens on the train’s approach to Paris, and most of the action takes place as the shrewd French detective questions the suspects in his bureau at what Griffiths calls – in the old-fashioned British manner – Gare de Lyons, with an ‘s’. (An even more fuddy-duddy British spelling was ‘Lions’.) In the copy I took from the London Library, some reader who evidently combined the qualities of pedant and vandal had crossed out every single superfluous ‘s’. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Agatha Christie had read this book, and drawn the conclusion, ‘There needs to be more action on board the train.’

  DINING CAR

  The dining car was light blue: it consisted of a bar and seating space, with fixed chairs, like an American diner. The lambency of a Wagons-Lits diner (mellow marquetry, warmhued armchairs and carpet) had been entirely banished. The only W-L element that had been retained was in the form of the good-quality white linen tablecloths. But it could not be said that I was doing much to uphold the formality of earlier days, because I had removed my shoes in the compartment, and come to the diner in the Thello slippers. In The Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains, Martin Page writes:

  Another Englishman travelling on the continent, Lord Russell, was acclaimed for putting a native with whom he was sharing a compartment in his place. As the train drew out of the station the foreigner proceeded to open his carpet-bag, take out a pair of slippers and untie the laces of his shoes.

  ‘If you do that, sir,’ proclaimed the great Victorian jurist, ‘I shall throw your shoes out of the window.’

  The foreigner remarked that he had the right to do as he wished in his own country, so long as he did not inconvenience others. Lord Russell demurred. The man took off his shoes, and Lord Russell threw them out of the window.

  A female maître d’hôtel stepped out from behind the bar, and showed me to a seat. At my mention of the free drink, she said, ‘Yes, you can have one. You could have beer or champagne.’

  ‘I’ll have the champagne please,’ I said, trying not to sound too excited.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s like champagne except it’s not champagne.’

  It was sparkling wine to be exact, and not bad at all, even if served in a rather small plastic glass. From three hot options on the menu, I ord
ered seafood risotto.

  The only other customers in the dining car were an American couple with their two sons. They were from Texas, and were regulars on European night trains. ‘We use them,’ the man said, ‘because we can’t do this sort of thing in America.’

  ‘But America invented sleeper trains,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ the man replied, with a sigh.

  And did they like the Thello train?

  ‘Yes,’ the man eventually replied, but his wife refined the point: ‘We like it because we have low expectations.’

  They had been from France to Italy on the Palatino Express shortly before it expired. ‘It was on its last legs,’ said the man.

  ‘There were no sheets on the beds until midnight,’ said the woman, ‘because of a strike.’

  On the question of whether they’d been put off by the terrorist attack in Paris, the woman replied, ‘Our friends said “Don’t go, not with the kids”,’ then she shrugged.

  My risotto arrived, on a paper plate, along with plastic cutlery and a paper napkin wrapped together in cellophane. It looked a prostrate, dead thing compared to the linen napery on the Wagons-Lits, which was customarily folded in the shape of a vertical conch shell. And everything looked mute: nothing tinkled. On a train, cutlery, crockery and glass should tinkle musically. On the W-L services, there was also the tinkling of the little bell – described by Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu, in Au bon temps des wagons-restaurants, as ‘la mythique clochette’ – carried by the maître d’, who walked along the corridors announcing the service of dinner.