Night Trains Read online

  It seemed strange to find a commercial organisation dedicated to sleeping, and therefore dreaming, and so to mystery in general. On a night train, after all, you might not easily know where you were.

  In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, one character has a ‘strange, almost romantic, passion for sleeping cars and Great European Express Trains … the soft crackle of polished panels in the blue-shaded night, the long sad sigh of brakes at dimly surmised stations, the upward slide of an embossed leather blind disclosing a platform, a man wheeling luggage, the milky globe of a lamp with a pale moth whirling around it’.

  Anything that could get Nabokov going like that must be a good thing, and it turned out that most of the writers I liked as a young man were enthusiasts for the ‘grands express internationaux’.

  THE SLEEPERS IN LITERATURE AND FILM

  In 1931, the young Graham Greene was dependent on selling review copies of novels to Foyle’s bookshop. He decided he’d better have a commercial success. As he said in his autobiography, ‘for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please’. The result, Stamboul Train, is set aboard one of the variants of the Orient Express, the Ostend-Vienna Orient Express. Greene could not afford a ticket to Constantinople, so he bought one to Cologne. Therefore, the early lineside scenes are more accurate than the later ones; as he admitted in his memoir, Ways of Escape, ‘you may be sure the allotments outside Bruges are just where I placed them’.

  His wife made him sandwiches so he could avoid the dining car. In the novel the chorus girl, Coral Musker, also has sandwiches. They enable her to save eight shillings, which is exactly what Greene saved. A chorus girl on a night train outpacing the jurisdictions through which it travels – this was always going to be a risqué novel. Stamboul Train also features a lesbian couple, an opportunist businessman, a revolutionary, a thief on the run. It is highly atmospheric. Here is the quayside at Ostend: ‘The wind dropped for ten seconds, and the smoke which had swept backwards and forwards across the quay and the metal acres in the quick gusts stayed for that time in the middle air.’

  Greene had feared that international sleeper trains were too popular a subject: ‘the film rights seemed at the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib’. In the event, Greene’s career was saved when his novel became a Book Society choice, but it was sent back in disgust by many members.

  In the compartment with Myatt (a Jewish currant trader), Coral Musker asks,

  ‘What shall I do? Take off all my clothes?’

  He nodded, finding it hard to speak, and saw her rise from the berth and go into a corner and begin to undress slowly and very methodically, folding each garment in turn and laying it neatly on the opposite seat.

  This being a Graham Greene novel, the next sentence reads, ‘He was conscious as he watched her calm movements of the inadequacy of his body.’ The reader is also not surprised that the sex scene is interrupted when the train comes to a sudden stop at a signal. But it wasn’t stopped soon enough for Greene’s aunt, Miss Helen Greene, who so disapproved of the book that she banished her nephew’s photo from her sitting room to her bedroom.

  Stamboul Train was filmed as Orient Express in 1933. Of the competing productions the best was probably Rome Express (1932), a tale of various night train passengers with things to hide. It was the first film to be shot at the Gaumont-British Studios at Lime Grove, Shepherd’s Bush – i.e. not on the Rome Express, though a cameraman did travel on the train to capture the moving landscape. The director, Walter Forde, said: ‘Even if there wasn’t a scene through the window I’d still have the back projection going, because it would throw shadows on the wall and all the stuff. There was always a tag hanging from a piece of luggage; there was always beads on the little table lamps, so that you get movement all the time.’

  Sidney Gilliat, who co-wrote Rome Express, also co-wrote The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Night Train to Munich (1940). The latter – a sexed-up version of a novel called The Wheel Spins, directed by Alfred Hitchcock – is set on board an Orient Express-like train. So Gilliat covered a sizeable part of the Wagons-Lits network.

  Greene gave Rome Express a good review in The Spectator, although he was not usually a fan of British detective films or stories: ‘I found them lacking in realism. There were too many suspects and the criminal never belonged to what used to be called the criminal class.’ He might have been slighting Murder on the Orient Express, published a year after Stamboul Train.

  Agatha Christie had an affinity for trains. In An Autobiography (1977), she wrote, ‘Trains have always been one of my favourite things. It is sad nowadays that one no longer has engines that seem to be one’s personal friends.’ Murder on the Orient Express is a refinement of her earlier Wagons-Lits novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), which is far too long and contains an operational implausibility, as we will see.

  Christie stood apart from the literary tussle described by Martin Green in his book Children of the Sun, which I read in the year of its publication, 1977, when I was in the sixth form. In it Green describes what he calls the ‘dandies’ of British interwar literature, people like Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Auden, Isherwood and Spender. They were seen as whimsical and decadent by the austere likes of F. R. Leavis and George Orwell. Reacting against Edwardian stolidity and nationalism, the dandies were great travellers, and often wrote travel books. Green cites Europe in the Looking Glass by Robert Byron as a ‘typical’ dandy travel book. Like many of the dandies, Byron was anti-American (except where it came to cocktails and jazz); he wanted to build a ‘European consciousness’.

  I was already on to the dandies; I had read their work, and it was fun to read about them because they lived abroad, giving me the idea – which turns out to be wrong – that the inevitable culmination of a writing life will be the acquisition of a large house in France or Italy. ‘The clubs that were most central to the dandies’ Oxford,’ Green wrote, ‘seem to have been the Hypocrites and the Railway.’ While the Hypocrites sounds about right, I am surprised at the Railway, which I’d have thought was a collection of trainspotters, but according to Green, ‘its members went on railway trips in a specially reserved carriage, all dressed in the height of elegance and eating and drinking luxuriously’. The Oxford University Railway Club was founded in 1923 by John Sutro, who later became a film producer, and died in Monaco. Its activities were recalled by Harold Acton in Memoirs of an Aesthete. The first journey was from Oxford to Leicester and back. The members reserved a saloon,

  and devoured a substantial dinner, superior to the usual fare in railway restaurants. The chef had evidently taken a special interest in its preparations, and it was served on spotless napery … Wine lent a Horation charm to [the] scenery, and the train serenaded us as we discussed the developments of travel since Stephenson’s Rocket. On arrival, the station bar greeted us with open arms. For twenty minutes we sipped rare liqueurs, Grand Marnier and green Chartreuse now long extinct, in that hospitable atmosphere.

  As to why these Hooray Henrys were so indulged, their practice of handing out silver cigarette boxes to railway staff might have had something to do with it.

  One of the ‘sonnenkinder’ was Henry Green (sorry, by the way, about all this greenery), the author of Party Going, a modernist novel in woozy prose which concerns a group of spoilt, gilded youths frustrated by a London fog in their attempt to travel by European sleeper trains. One of the female characters flags down a taxi somewhere around Mayfair:

  ‘Hurry, hurry.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To the station of course.’

  ‘Which station?’

  ‘For France, stupid.’

  The taxi driver takes her to Victoria, but the party become stranded there, in the station hotel overlooking the concourse:

 
Electric lights had been lit by now, fog still came in by the open end of this station, below that vast green vault of glass roof with every third person smoking it might all have looked to Mr Roberts, ensconced in his office away above, like November sun striking through mist rising off water.

  Mr Roberts is the station master, and the only down-to-earth person in the book.

  LA COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGONS-LITS ET DES GRANDS EXPRESS EUROPÉENS

  The company that stimulated so many imaginations was conceived in the late 1860s by Georges Nagelmackers, who was Jewish and Belgian, therefore also international. Belgium was, and is, a railway-loving country, and has the densest network in Europe. It is too small for domestic sleepers, so any Belgian interested in long-distance trains would have to look to France and Germany, each of which wanted good relations with Belgium as a counterweight against the other.

  It is notoriously difficult – at least, for the British – to name six famous Belgians, but Nagelmackers deserves to make the list. He stands out as an early proponent of European integration. Yes, his trains had to run through border controls, but Wagons-Lits passengers could sleep through the night just as if the Schengen agreement already applied. This was because they entrusted their passports to the train staff, who would hand them over for a nominal inspection at the borders. National barriers were overcome in other ways. For instance, the restaurant cars contained bonded cupboards, meaning spirits served in one country could be locked away when the border was reached, while another lot were taken out of another cupboard. By this method, the company avoided the accusation of exporting spirts – and the duty that would have been payable for doing so. The bills were made out in the currency of whatever country the train was passing through when the meal ended, but any currency was acceptable, and there was an official table of Wagons-Lits exchange rates.

  All the staff were multilingual: three was the minimum number of languages they had to command. A man in charge of a sleeping car was called a sleeping car conductor, and he himself did not sleep, although he may have drowsed, as he kept an eye on the compartments from a fold-down seat at the end of the corridor. (How, in that case, could there have been a Murder on the Orient Express? This question will be addressed.) The head of the restaurant car was the maître d’hôtel, and crammed inside the kitchen was a brigade de cuisine, with a chef de cuisine in charge (a man often destined, in the first half of the twentieth century, to be headhunted by one of the better European hotels). He supervised an under-chef, a saucier and a plongeur, or washer-up. There would also be a couple of serveurs, or waiters.

  The railway systems of Europe differed from country to country – usually deliberately, to deter invasion. Nagelmackers got round this by fitting his carriages with various brake hoses and steam pipes – multi-plugs, in effect. And all standard carriage notices were in French, German, Italian and English. The destinations of the trains were written in blue on white enamel plaques hung waist high on the carriage sides, and these were graciously spelt in the language of the destination, so it was always ‘London’, always ‘Bruxelles’ – at least in theory. But when James Bond is about to board the Simplon Orient Express in From Russia with Love, he reads ‘Istanbul, Thessalonika, Beograd, Venezia, Milan, Lausanne and Paris’, wondering ‘Why not MILANO?’

  In his book about Wagons-Lits, Sleeping Story (which, in spite of the title, is only available in French), Jean des Cars described Nagelmackers as a ‘magicien’ of a ‘nouvel art’. But Nagelmackers’ vision was inspired by America, a country of genuinely united states, where, in the mid-1860s, George Mortimer Pullman had created a sleeper train empire. Pullman ran not just sleepers and diners, but also carriages equipped with hairdressing salons, organs (for church services) and libraries.

  In 1873, while establishing his own first sleepers, Nagelmackers formed a brief alliance with an American rival to Pullman. Colonel William Mann was a flamboyant self-declared ‘soldier, inventor, editor’, who created what would become the standard type of sleeper in Europe and the UK. In Mann’s cars, passengers slept at right angles to the direction of travel, not in line with the train, like a corpse in a hearse, as was the way on the Pullmans. His fellow Americans didn’t like the Mann model, which became the European model – and it is possibly not a good idea, because when the train goes round a bend, the crosswise sleeper’s head is lower than his feet, or vice versa. Presumably, this was what Captain Alfred A. Cunningham was getting at when he wrote, in 1917, in The Diary of a Marine Flyer in France, ‘Don’t like the French Wagon-Lits. The berths are much too narrow and it is not comfortable sleeping crossways of the car.’

  Mann’s sleepers were in compartments, whereas Pullman sleepers were in open carriages, which suited the less snobbish Americans. Mann said the American arrangement encouraged impropriety. But Mann-type cars had connecting doors, and Mann called them ‘boudoir cars’, being a racy character himself. (After Nagelmackers bought him out in 1876, it is said that he ran a blackmailing operation from the Langham Hotel in London, based on tip-offs from Lillie Langtry.)

  During the 1880s, Nagelmackers established a dozen luxury sleeper trains across Europe. The national railway companies supplied the locomotives, Wagons-Lits the sleepers and diners. The national companies got the ticket revenue, but a supplement was charged, and this went to Wagons-Lits.

  In 1883, after negotiations with eight governments, Nagelmackers began running the Orient Express, which groped its way from Paris to Constantinople. In 1886 came the Calais-Mediterranée Express, forerunner of the famous Blue Train. In 1887 came the Sud Express (Paris-Madrid-Lisbon), and in 1890 the Rome Express (Calais-Rome), which went via the Mont Cenis Tunnel connecting France and Italy. The Simplon Tunnel, connecting Switzerland and Italy, opened in 1906, facilitating the Simplon Express (Calais-Venice). On the eve of the First World War, with the European skies still empty of passenger planes, 120 Wagons-Lits expresses served a territory from Lisbon in the south to St Petersburg in the north.

  Two years into the First World War, Germany seized any W-L stock on their territory, and started their own sleeping car company, known by its acronym, MITROPA. On these confiscated cars the brass Wagons-Lits side-crests – showing two lions rampant – were covered up.

  ***

  In the interwar period the Wagons-Lits company reached its numerical peak. By the mid-1930s it had 806 sleeper cars and 661 dining cars. But in The Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains, Martin Page argues that quantity had replaced quality: ‘It was now to carry larger numbers in less comfort and for less money to holiday resorts nearer home.’ People no longer dressed for the dinners, ‘which had in any case been reduced to a mere soup, meat and dessert affair’.

  That’s one way of describing this menu from the Train Bleu in the early 1960s, as quoted by George Behrend in Grand European Expresses:

  Consommé madrilène

  Filets de soles Duclère

  Poulets cocotte grand-mère

  Petits pois a la française

  Salads de saison

  Fromages variés

  Boule de neige

  Corbeille de fruits

  True, most of the hotels operated by the company had now closed. The Russian Revolution had forced W-L to relinquish its Russian operations, but they had been marginal anyway. The first scheduled air service between London and Paris began in 1919, but aviation wouldn’t dent the W-L business for another twenty years. (One student of the company told me the fatal moment was in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain returned from his meeting with Hitler assuring the world of ‘Peace for our time’: fatal both because he’d been duped and because he’d travelled by plane rather than W-L express, thereby setting a bad example that thousands would follow after the war.)

  In the 1920s and 1930s, the mythology of the Orient Express was created, and much of it was based on the brand-new version, the Simplon Orient Express, which was inaugurated in 1919, and cold-shouldered Germany on its way to Istanbul. It went into Italy via the Simplon, then
Venice, Belgrade and Sofia. Whereas W-L normally had to petition governments for leave to run its trains, it was commissioned by the Versailles powers to operate the Simplon Orient. This is partly why its reputation eclipsed that of the original, plain Orient Express, which continued to run, by its more northerly route, from the Gare de l’Est.

  By the Versailles settlement the operations of MITROPA had been restricted to Germany and some adjacent countries. The MITROPA carriages were not blue but ‘Bordeaux red’, and the renewal of Germany’s imperial ambitions was symbolised by the new MITROPA logo: a hawk, which doesn’t seem right for a sleeper service, and in 1938 MITROPA again seized whatever W-L services lay within reach.

  The true watershed was the Second rather than the First World War. The Iron Curtain came down, impeding W-L services, and its trains began to be diluted. By the early 1960s, Wagons-Lits carriages were referred to as generic ‘voiture lits’, and might be attached to any old night train. From 1957, the company name was eclipsed by that of a new network of trains operated by a syndicate of Western European railways: these Trans-European Expresses (TEEs) were aimed at businessmen enjoying the integrationist benefits of the new EEC. They were scheduled to allow a full working day at the destination, but were early morning or evening, rather than night, trains. The Cook’s timetable described them as ‘luxury, air-conditioned services between important European cities’.

  There is the Kraftwerk album of 1977, Trans-Europa Express. They released a single of the same name, which is not as catchy as their song about roads, ‘Autobahn’, but has the same suggestion of a somehow dehumanised transportation. Trans-Europ[no ‘e’]-Express is also the title of an experimental thriller of 1966 by Alain Robbe-Grillet, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier. To quote the blurb on the DVD: ‘Trintignant plays a drug courier smuggling a stash of cocaine from Paris to Antwerp on the Trans-Europ-Express. Matters are complicated by surreal encounters with the police … and erotic fantasy sequences featuring Pisier being bound and subjected to Trintignant’s will.’ Compared to that last element, it would be of little interest to most purchasers of the film that the TEE train in question was the Étoile du Nord, which had originally been a W-L service, or that W-L did the catering on some of these trains. (The company continued to provide catering services on many European expresses, even as its own famous trains died off.)