Night Trains Read online

  Wagons-Lits had sold many of its sleeping cars to the various national railways, which, from 1971, painted them a more insipid blue, and began operating them under the brands Trans Euro Nuit/Nacht/Notte/Night, according to country, the acronym ‘TEN’ being formed in each case. The whole consortium was known as TENPOOL, and W-L staff worked on them as required. The sleeper blankets were camel-coloured rather than red, as they had usually been on the old W-L services.

  Since 1993, the main brand of European sleepers has been called EuroNight (one word), and there are more than twenty of these services, operated by one or more of fifteen Western European railway companies. When I started working on this book, in early 2015, the second-biggest brands were the French Intercité de Nuit trains, operating almost entirely within France (with occasional spillages over the border, for example to Luxembourg City and Irun in Spain), and the German City Night Line trains, traversing Europe from as far west as Amsterdam to as far east as Warsaw, with Berlin and Rome as the northern and southern extremities. There were about a dozen each of the Intercités and City Night Lines.

  If the films and books mentioned above were triggered by the popularity of European sleepers, this book was triggered by their decline, in the face of competition from budget flights, budget coaches, budget hotels and the high-speed trains, which are treacherously killing off their laggardly brethren. European Union transport policy has not helped, as we will be seeing, but the in-built disadvantage of a sleeper is obvious. A full sleeping car might accommodate thirty people. A full carriage on an ordinary train will accommodate eighty.

  A Guardian article of 13 September 2014 was headed ‘The Sleeper Vanishes’. Two City Night Line sleepers – between Brussels and Copenhagen, and Paris and Munich – would be stopped in the coming December. The French-Spanish Elipsos night train from Paris to Barcelona and Madrid had been stopped the previous December, while the joint Italian-French venture, Thello, would no longer be operating its sleeper between Paris and Rome. Other more obscure services had recently been, or would soon be, stopped.

  Most of my journeys were undertaken in the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016, as further death sentences were announced: most of the Intercités de Nuit would cease by October 2016, and all of the Deutsche Bahn City Night Line sleepers would be stopped by December.

  The older the British reader of that news, the greater the likelihood of their feeling depressed by it. The youngster, with one experimental Interrail night journey under his or her belt, would be less affected than the ninety-year-old, who might – in childhood – have traversed in Europe in the 1930s, when almost every one of the 300 pages of the Thomas Cook Continental Timetable included a footnote designating at least one service on that page as ‘Sleeper’. Still other Britons might feel a vague regret at a passing of a world that was vague to them in the first place.

  WAGONS-LITS AND THE BRITISH

  I imagine that, inside the head of any British person watching Murder On the Orient Express, there is a small voice marvelling, ‘Never mind this dead body; where did they buy their tickets?’ Britain is cut off from the continental railways by the Channel, and our different loading gauge inhibits through working. Originally the European sleepers went out of their way to pick us up from Calais, but from the early 1960s the Calais connections withered. The British, being from an island nation, had taken to the skies. Along with places like Cyprus, we have always been towards the top of lists of nations ranked by propensity to fly.

  The basic currency of Wagons-Lits (carriages convertible into sleepers) was also worthless within Britain, because by the time the night had ended, any journey on a British sleeper was over – or some time before in the case of the ones that used to run from London to Manchester. Fixed berths have usually sufficed on our sleepers, of which we are down to two: the Caledonian Sleeper from London to Scotland1 and the Night Riviera to Cornwall. These have a brighter future than the sleepers on the continent, but they will never emulate the true W-L experience, because passengers are ejected soon after eating their perfunctory breakfast, and the local population speaks the same language (more or less) at the destination as at the starting point. But Britain nearly had sleeper trains of true glamour …

  I travelled on Eurostar on the second day of its operation. It was November 1994. As I sat next to a rail enthusiast who was timing the journey with a stopwatch and taking processed cheese sandwiches to the gastronomic capital of the world, I picked up a leaflet headlined ‘What Next?’ which boasted: ‘In early 1997 night trains will be introduced, travelling from Scotland, the North West, South Wales and the West into Paris … Passengers can enjoy a good night’s rest in comfortable accommodation and arrive refreshed in the morning.’

  I like the keenness of that word ‘early’. The Nightstars never materialised, although they were built, with both day and night carriages – and a new service depot at Manchester sprouted a billboard reading, ‘Le Eurostar habite ici’. But the business case was killed off by the budget airlines, which Eurostar planners failed to foresee. The trains were eventually sold to Canada.

  The Nightstars would not only have served the north, they would also have shunned London, or at least central London, because their journey south would have taken them via Stratford in east London, and the only reason Stratford station was built – and the reason it is called Stratford International – was to serve these trains. Today, Stratford must make do with domestic high-speed trains to Kent. Eurostar itself has never stopped there, in spite of intense lobbying from Stratford. It would be farcical for a high-speed train to leave St Pancras and stop six minutes later at Stratford. It would be like having a high-speed tram.

  But if Britain has stood apart from the network of European sleepers, its upper classes were once its main customers. This was because Britain was the richest nation. In the late nineteenth century, most of the passengers on the premier train de luxe referred to ‘the Orient Express’ rather than the ‘Express d’Orient’, and in 1891 the Anglicised version became the official name. It is odd, therefore, that W-L never became famous in Britain, even when it gained a British chairman, and ran a sumptuous booking office in London – practically an embassy – at Cockspur Street, between Pall Mall and Trafalgar Square. This was because the identity of the company was hidden behind two more stolid brands. Thomas Cook was one; the other was Pullman.

  We last heard of George Mortimer Pullman as the founder of an American sleeper train empire. He died in 1897, having failed to establish his sleeper brand in Europe, with the exception of Italy. But the Pullman name would eventually appear throughout the continent, by the following nepotistic route.

  In 1903, Georges Nagelmackers’ son, René, married the daughter of a British businessman called Davison Dalziel (introducer of motorised taxis to London). Dalziel then joined the W-L board. Three years later, Dalziel purchased the British subsidiary of the American Pullman company. In 1925 he became chairman of Wagons-Lits, and granted it the right to use the Pullman name. So there began to be Wagons-Lits Pullmans, but these were not sleepers. They had armchairs, not beds, and were luxury day cars (either with or without kitchens), used on such W-L trains as ran in daytime only. They never graduated to complete dark blueness, but were – with some exceptions – painted dark blue below the waist, and cream above. These cars were used on such day trains as L’Oiseau Bleu (Antwerp-Paris, 1929), the Flèche d’Or (Calais-Paris, 1926), the Sunshine Pullman Express (Cairo-Luxor, 1929) or the Étoile du Nord (Paris-Amsterdam, 1927).

  The Flèche d’Or operated in conjunction with the Golden Arrow (London to Dover), and showed touching solidarity with the Arrow in the following way: its Pullmans were not painted in the usual colour scheme of the continental Pullmans mentioned above, dark blue and cream, but were the same colour as the British Pullmans: chocolate and cream.

  This train was a feeder for many of the continental sleepers, and a Fleet Street photographer at a loose end might be sent to Victoria to see which celebrities were
boarding the Arrow. But it was rivalled by the other ‘British’ Wagons-Lits service: the Night Ferry (1936–1980). This had more mystique, being a French train that actually began in London (whereas the Flèche d’Or only picked up the baton passed to it at Dover by the Golden Arrow), and the Night Ferry, as its name suggested, was nocturnal. It too was a Victoria-to-Paris service, but its carriages were loaded onto a train ferry that carried them from Dover to Dunkirk. It was more difficult to see which celebrities were boarding this train, since they did so behind a barricaded-off extension to Platform 2 at Victoria. Yet the attention of ordinary passengers was drawn to this exclusive portal by a high neon sign with the words ‘Night Ferry’ written in pale blue neon, above a yellow electric moon and a cluster of stars. In effect, this sign said both ‘go away’ and ‘look closer’, like a car’s tinted windscreen.

  I mentioned that the other ‘front’ for Wagons-Lits in Britain was Thomas Cook. In 1928 Cook’s was bought by Wagons-Lits. A network of travel agencies was established, the advertising posters reading ‘Wagons Lits-Cook. Partout et toujours à votre service’. A British traveller lost or confused abroad would look for the gold-braided red cap of a ‘Cook’s man’, and I imagine plenty did so in vain after Cook’s men ceased to exist. Cook’s and W-L went their separate ways after the war, and it had been an odd alliance. On the one hand was Cook’s, founded in 1871 by an abstainer who made his first money from temperance excursions; and on the other were Wagons-Lits sleeper cars, with signs all along the corridors pointing towards the bar car. Later, there would be a more emphatic divergence, when Cook’s entered the chartered flight business.

  PARIS

  An article on the Lonely Planet website once described Paris as ‘the omphalos’ of sleeper trains, which was just the right word I thought (once I’d looked it up), and part of the attraction of the sleepers for me is that they start from my favourite city.

  When I go to Paris, I view the selection of reproduction W-L posters displayed in a railway bookshop, La Vie du Rail, at the back of Gare St Lazare. One poster they always have in stock is called ‘La Confort Sur Le Rail’. It dates from the 1960s, and shows a woman and a man in a sleeper compartment. He is in his pyjamas, smoking suavely on the top bunk, and I wonder whether the cigarette is pre- or postcoital. She stands in her nightie by the window, indicating to him a nocturnal, Alpine scene. One of the best Wagons-Lits posters was for the above mentioned Étoile du Nord. It was the work of A. M. Cassandre, a Ukrainian-French painter who committed suicide in Paris in 1968, and was the most distinguished graphic artist to work for W-L. The poster shows a tilted star at the end of tracks converging in the far distance. As Henri Mouron wrote in his book Cassandre, ‘Here the perspective is tipped sharply upward. The horizon is pushed toward the upper reaches of the composition, leaving just enough room for the five-pointed star symbolising the express train. Placed over the vanishing point where the rails converge, the star sheds its luminousness over the entire composition, dissolving the mysterious darkness lingering at the bottom of the composition’ – ‘darkness’ even though the Étoile was a day train.

  La Vie du Rail has the intimidating subtitle, written over the door, ‘Le Monde du Train et du Voyage Intelligent’. Inside, I once spent – not very intelligently – thirty pounds on a book I couldn’t read, my French not being up to it (which is why I look at the posters). Au bon temps des wagons-restaurants is written by the interesting-sounding Eve-Marie Zizza-Lalu, and focuses on the Wagons-Lits dining cars. There are photographs of proud chefs and waiters, grouped like so many football teams, the tall ones at the back, the chef in the position of the captain. Also pictured are vast blocks of ice, crates of wine, racks of dangling charcuterie, all being loaded into vans for despatch to the Paris termini from the company’s giant pantry at Maison Raoul Dautry, in central Paris. The book has a very French concern with the nuts and bolts of fine dining. There is an engineering drawing showing the ideal dimensions of a Wagons-Lits chocolatier, and a plan of the salle de restaurant and the salon-bar of the Train Bleu in 1928.

  While we are in this Parisian locale, I might as well mention a couple of nearby attractions likely to interest the fan of Wagons-Lits. The tracks emerging from Gare St Lazare are straddled by the Pont de L’Europe, which unites intersecting roads, like a great stone star. From here, you can look down on double-decker commuter trains being pulled or pushed by locomotives, like vigorous young men helping old ladies across the road. The French use more locomotives than we do, most of our trains being worm-like multiple units with no separate power car. Locomotives are the alpha males of any rolling stock, and in France they look it, especially the pugilistic 1500s, known as the nez cassé, or ‘broken nose class’, because of their indented fronts and rears. They resemble squashed letter Z’s.

  The Pont de L’Europe has often been a vantage point for painters. In 1873 Édouard Manet painted The Railway, the composition showing a woman and a small girl in front of some severe black railings. Beyond the railings is large-scale modernity – the bridge, the tracks into St Lazare, the new flats overlooking those tracks – but all is confused by a cloud of steam. The little girl is interested in the scene, but the woman has turned her back on it, apparently in despair. In the late 1870s Claude Monet painted images of the same bridge and station. Both he and Manet followed Zola’s injunction to ‘find the poetry of stations as their fathers found that of forests and rivers’. But locomotives generated scenes that had something in common with forests and rivers: a fluid, organic element, arising from the play of light in the shifting steam.

  Zola himself made Gare St Lazare the centrepiece of his novel, La Bête humaine. This is a hysterical tale of sex and violence, symbolised by the pounding of the engines between St Lazare and Le Havre, with which all the characters are connected. The story culminates on a night train full of drunken soldiers heading for the Franco-Prussian War – or an even earlier demise, since the driver and fireman have fallen to their deaths after an argument over a woman. The cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition is a painting by Gustave Caillebotte called Le Pont de l’Europe. It shows a man looking down on the station from the bridge. There is a strolling flâneur, perhaps a depiction of Caillebotte himself. He is possibly eyeing up the man looking down on the station. The woman walking alongside the flâneur has been interpreted as a prostitute. It’s unlikely that both interpretations could be true. A dog is heading purposefully over the bridge in the opposite direction, and doubtless it, too, is going off to have sex.

  Opposite the front of Gare St Lazare, at 40 Rue de l’Arcade, is the Wagons-Lits company’s former head office: a neo-Gothic building of 1903. On the corner of the building, at the junction with Rue des Mathurins, is a big clock under a stone canopy, a carved map of the world, and the initials ‘WL’. It is now mainly flats. A five-minute walk from here is 3 Place de l’Opéra, which is given in Baedeker’s Paris for 1903 as ‘the principal ticket office of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (sleeping cars)’, whereas the travelling public were warned that Rue de l’Arcade was ‘administration only’. Number 3 Place de l’Opéra retains a vaguely international flavour in that it now houses the United Colours of Benetton.

  Let us now go to Paris.

  1

  THE BLUE TRAIN

  GARE DE LYON

  I had boarded the first Eurostar of the day. It had been too early even for breakfast, and I slept for the first hour. Dawn broke soon after Ashford International, but then we were into the Tunnel. When Eurostar services began, the ‘transit time’ was always given. Now that we have all become more blasé, the announcement is usually dispensed with, and sometimes, on a late-night Eurostar, you only know you’re under the sea by the disappearance of the moon.

  But in April 2015 the Tunnel had renewed significance, because of the migrants waiting at Calais to get through it. That morning there would have been 5,000 people in the ‘Jungle’, all in a permanent ticket queue, but with no prospect of the ticket office window e
ver opening. The Jungle was out of sight for Eurostar passengers, on the other side of town, but as we emerged into a grey French morning, a lonely figure was visible, looking through the high mesh fence that had just been built.

  On arrival at nine-thirty, Gare du Nord had been freezing. The greyness of the morning had made it necessary to switch on the lights in their glass globes, but Gare du Nord suits the cold. It is bleak and wintry in a painting of 1908 by Pieter ten Cate, which is on display at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. In Les Mémoires de Maigret (1951) Georges Simenon wrote of Gare du Nord: ‘In the morning, the first night trains, arriving from Belgium and Germany, bring the first load of crooks, with faces as hard as the light that falls through the window panes.’ This was not the generous spirit that would give rise to the Schengen agreement thirty-four years later, and the banishment of passports within Europe. Nord, like four of the six main Paris stations, is international, and just as the indicator board shows timings of Thalys trains to Belgium and Holland, so the statues on the roof of slightly overweight, toga-clad women represent foreign destinations present and past.

  One of the statues represents London, and should there be any doubt about this, the lady stands on a plinth marked ‘London’. (The others are Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Vienna and Warsaw.) Nord has always been the point of arrival for the British, and those seeking the sleeper trains then faced the moderate challenge of ‘the change at Paris’. It is addressed quite perfunctorily in a leaflet given out to passengers booking trains through SNCF: ‘There are seven main train stations in Paris.2 The station you need will be clearly marked on your tickets. It sounds obvious, but make sure you are heading for the right station before you set off on the Paris Underground system.’