Night Trains Read online

  Travellers are advised to allow at least one hour for the change. If you book a through ticket for Eurostar followed by another SNCF train from Paris, you are given two hours. The two stations most likely to be required by a Briton are the nearest one to Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, or the one furthest away, Gare de Lyon. A real disaster would have to intervene for the change between Nord and Est to take two hours, since it is a five-minute walk. The trip to Gare de Lyon could take two hours if there were problems on the Métro, but there are seldom problems on the Métro. It presents two difficulties for the changer though: firstly, the map is incomprehensible; secondly, the Métro is mostly just below street level, so there are often staircases where British passengers, with bulky suitcases, would expect an escalator. But a journey on the Métro ought to be, and usually is, a pleasure. The station names are elegantly written in white on dark-blue enamel plates; platform tiles are white, glazed and bevelled, so they sparkle under electric light, and the station names are beautiful. Here is Lawrence Osborne, in Paris Dreambook: ‘The Métro is above all a system of names, names which are a thousand times more secretive than the places they supposedly denote. Filles du Calvaire, Bel-Air, Crimée, Danube, Pyramides, Campo-Formio, Botzaris, Croix-de-Chavaux, Jasmin, Ourcq … the mercurial names of the Métro, with the exoticism of the names of extinct birds and buried cities.’

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  The weather at Gare de Lyon always seems better than the weather at Nord. As the Parisian staging post for the Riviera, Gare de Lyon seems to give travellers a preview of the sunlight that awaits them. Today, the stars of the station are the TGV expresses to Italy and the South of France; for much of the twentieth century, the stars were the blue trains of the W-L company going to the same places.

  Gare de Lyon was the terminus of the ‘Ligne Impériale’ – the main line of the old Chemins de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée (henceforth PLM, because I am not typing that again), which was absorbed into SNCF in 1938, when French railways were nationalised. As befits the beauty of the destination, there is a feminine delicacy about the Gare. The ironwork of the roof is green, rather than soot-blackened; there are palm trees in tubs along the platforms. If the station contained an orangery, you wouldn’t be surprised, because there is something of the conservatory about it. In his novel Howards End (1910), E. M. Forster wrote that, ‘In Paddington all Cornwall is latent, and the remoter west.’ By the same token, all of the Riviera is latent in Gare de Lyon. The directors of the PLM made quite sure of that, by commissioning the paintings of points south that are seen in the booking hall, and in the gilded Train Bleu restaurant, which is accessed from the concourse by an imperial (that is, two-sided) staircase, an opera set within an opera set. When I first met my wife she lived in Paris, and I used to meet her in the Train Bleu for a glass of wine. Once, we recklessly called for the menu. Surprisingly enough, it seemed that a dinner could be had for about twenty-five pounds, but these turned out to be only the starters. I once began questioning a waiter about the place, and he stalked off without answering, apparently disgusted by my bad French. But he returned with an English-language leaflet:

  The décor of the rooms is almost overwhelming, but the overall effect is a harmonious tribute to the distinctive style of the ‘Belle Époque’ period … The brightly coloured paintings in the various rooms are one of the most distinctive features. They have been carefully preserved, despite the smoke fumes from the steam locomotives of the day and were recently restored to their original state. There are 41 paintings in all, each of which portrays a different scene from the beautiful sites along the old railway network or famous events of the 1900s.

  Baedeker’s Paris for 1904, the standard guide for British visitors, deals with this sumptuous facility in one short sentence: ‘The buffet on the first floor [of the Gare de Lyon] is generously painted and decorated,’ which seems churlish, given that this was the year of the Entente Cordiale, and given that this so-called buffet had been opened only three years before by the President of France, Émile Loubet. It’s possible that even the French called it ‘Le buffet’ in those days, because it was not named Le Train Bleu until 1963, in honour of the most famous named train departing from Gare de Lyon. But there is something persistently jaundiced about the Baedeker, perhaps arising from jealousy. Of French trains, it says, ‘The carriages are inferior to those in most other parts of Europe … Before starting, travellers are generally cooped up in the close and dusty waiting rooms.’ The generality of Parisian railway restaurants are ‘dear and often poor’.

  None of this had deterred half a million from Britons travelling to France in 1900, and ‘le trafic anglais’ was a big payer for the French railway companies. It was the British who had first put the Riviera on the map as a tourist destination, albeit a winter one. In Nice, the ‘Promenade des Anglais’, the statue of Queen Victoria, and the Anglican church, Holy Trinity, erected in the 1860s, are testament to this. (Holy Trinity has a graveyard, which became the final destination of the many British consumptives who had travelled to Nice for the cleaner air.)

  The most famous of the Riviera expresses was the blue train that was actually called the Blue Train, and we are coming to that. Its direct predecessor was another W-L creation, the Calais-Méditerranée Express (CME), which began operations in 1889, running three times a week in the off season, and every day in the high season of December–April. The importance of the British market is shown by the fact that, in its early days, this snubbed Paris altogether. The timetable for 1896 shows the CME leaving London Charing Cross at 11.00, arriving in Calais at 12.49, French time; it next crops up at Amiens, north of Paris, at 02.59. (It arrived at Nice at 11.00 the next morning, terminating in Ventimiglia at 12.36.)

  British railway companies were so alarmed at the numbers of wealthy travellers holidaying abroad that in 1892 they had launched an anti-foreign holidays campaign, in the form of a journal called Travel. Travel promoted holidaying at home: ‘Cheap holidays in Scotland … The new route to the Norfolk Broads.’ Readers were stolidly advised to ‘Take the Great Northern Railway: The Direct Route to the North-East Coast watering places.’ Travel mentioned foreign travel to some extent, but the continent was presented as a Wagons-Lits-free zone. Neither the company’s trains nor hotels were mentioned, and there was something suspiciously generic about the proffered alternatives. Tickets were bookable from London to Paris by ‘special expresses’. ‘The South Eastern Railway’s Continental Services’ were heavily advertised: ‘Fast steamers in conjunction with Special Express Trains daily … Coupe-lits-toilette and Coupe-interior daily between Boulogne and Paris … This service connects with the continental express trains to Switzerland and Italy.’ (It was just about possible to circumvent Wagons-Lits on the continent, since it never quite had a monopoly of sleepers. Both Swiss and French railways operated their own, for example, but they were not of Wagons-Lits standards of comfort. Everyone shared a compartment; heating was by hot water in tin trays rather than by hot water pipes as on the W-L.)

  Travel advised its readers to buy tickets from men who sounded like British stooges: the London Chatham & Dover Railway’s agent in Paris was ‘Capt. A. W. Churchward, 30 Bvd des Italiens’. It was all like a version of Europe erected quickly in cardboard. Whereas the Wagons-Lits company hotels had exotic names like (in Nice) the Cimiez Riviera Palace, Travel promoted the Hotel de L’Europe in Milan; in Cairo, the Hotel d’Angleterre; or in Rome the equally unconvincing Grand Hotel de Rome. Particularly suspect was the following: ‘Buffet Restaurant, Gare du Nord, Paris. This excellent Restaurant is under the direction of M. Victor Buffetro, and is well appointed in every way.’

  Travel was allied to the moralistic idea of travel, to which that British pioneer of package holidays, Thomas Cook, subscribed. According to this, the point of travel was self-improvement. The editor was Henry Simpson Lunn, a muscular Christian and Methodist minister who founded the Lunn Poly travel company and, in 1905, the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club. Under Lunn,
Travel – produced in black-and-white – was a worthy affair, advertising stout shoes, travelling rugs (the adverts seem to emphasise the winteriness of ‘winter resorts’), trunks and portmanteaus. Other glum objects like Bailey’s Surgical Hose, for varicose veins, and Bunter’s Nervine (‘relieves neuralgia’) were advertised, but never alcohol.

  There was a culture clash here with the more louche and luxurious world of Wagons-Lits, which responded in 1894 with its own English-language journal, The Continental Traveller. This magazine’s pretty covers were all pinks, greens and powder blues, giving an impression of heat haze, much like the paintings in Gare de Lyon. There are many maps – in which the company’s sleeping car services are shown as thick red lines – and adverts for things the more epicurean overnight traveller would need, including solid-silver miniature travelling clocks, travelling writing cases, fur-lined coats and whisky. It is full of exciting headings: ‘Special Cars for Private Use’, ‘Buffet Cars on the Riviera’, ‘Winter Fêtes in Nice’, and exciting sentences like ‘The train is composed exclusively of sleeping cars, restaurant cars and through baggage cars.’ Just as Travel never mentioned any foreign railway company by name, so The Continental Traveller never mentioned any British one. The approach to that all-important aperture, Calais, is simply by ‘trains from Charing Cross’ or ‘trains from Victoria’.

  Whereas Travel masqueraded as an independent journal, The Continental Traveller made no bones about being ‘The Official Journal, Time Book and Guide of the International Sleeping Car & European Express Trains Co.’, which is what Wagons-Lits called itself in Britain.

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  The early Calais-Mediterranée Express was not blue. Its sleeper carriages were clad in teak, and were teak-coloured, i.e. brown. After the First World War, the W-L service to the Riviera was relaunched with new sleeper carriages, designated ‘S’ type. These were made of steel, and they were blue. In 1926, the teak restaurant cars of the service were also replaced with blue, steel ones, and so here was an entirely blue train which, from 1929, ran every day between Paris and the Riviera, with arrangements for gathering up passengers from Calais. It was known to all its users, and to anyone who was interested in railways, as the Blue Train. The only people who did not call it the Blue Train were the Wagons-Lits company, who continued to call it the Calais-Mediterranée Express. The stroke of genius involved in painting the train blue was not followed by what you would have thought was the logical step of officially naming it the Blue Train. W-L, normally so good at publicity, were missing a trick here, because clearly people wanted trains to be blue, hence Le Train Bleu ballet of 1924, performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with music by Darius Milhaud, story by Jean Cocteau, costumes by Coco Chanel and curtain by Pablo Picasso. Hence also the ‘Blue Train Races’, in which various playboys – particularly Woolf Barnato, chairman of the Bentley company – tested their high-performance cars by racing the train. And hence Agatha Christie’s novel of 1928, The Mystery of the Blue Train. In 1949, the company would relent, and Train Bleu became the official name. (All that being said, Vladimir Nabokov did not like Wagons-Lits blue. Writing of the Nord Express in Speak, Memory, he wrote, ‘it was never the same after World War One when its elegant brown became a nouveau-riche blue’.)

  For most of its existence until the early 1930s the CME – which from now on I will call the Blue Train – was a service comprising two trains, one leaving from Paris and one from Calais. The financial crash of 1929 ended such operational exuberance, and from now on passengers for the Blue Train who wanted to join the service at Calais could do so, but it was a matter of boarding a different train in the first instance. Usually this different train was the luxury Flèche d’Or (Calais-Paris), the French complement to the luxury British Golden Arrow service (London-Dover), which had begun in 1929. The Arrow was a Pullman train, hence composed of luxurious day cars. The Flèche was also a Pullman, and these were the special Wagons-Lits Pullmans described in the Introduction.

  Here is how things worked from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.

  The Arrow departed from Victoria at 11am. Having already downed a large breakfast at the Grosvenor Hotel adjacent to the station, passengers would probably do nothing more indulgent before reaching Dover than drink tea, eat a couple of crust-less chicken sandwiches, and drink a quarter bottle of champagne. The Channel crossing was by a particularly elegant steamer called the SS Canterbury, which had a palm court and a restaurant ‘in the Empire style’ that anticipated Parisian brasseries. But most people took lunch on the next stage of the journey, on the Pullman dining car of the Flèche d’Or, which was the most exciting part of that train, with the possible exception of the blue sleeping car that had been attached at Calais for the benefit of those aspiring to the Blue Train. These passengers travelled to Paris through the afternoon, in sleeping accommodation not yet made up for sleeping, but configured as seats.

  When the train pulled into the Gare du Nord at about 5.30pm, the sleeping car, which was at the rear, was plucked off by a shunter, and taken to Gare de Lyon via the Petite Ceinture, the smaller of the two orbital railways around Paris. (The other being the Grande Ceinture.) At Gare de Lyon, the sleeper was attached to the ten or eleven carriages of the principal train.

  Sometimes Cook’s themselves would muddy the waters by changing the way they presented a train. The Blue Train after 1930 started from Paris Gare de Lyon, but had a feeder from Calais. That was the objective fact. But you wouldn’t know that from the timetables, which simply gave the time of departure from Calais followed by the time of departure from Gare de Lyon. Starting from the early 1960s, the distinction was made a bit clearer by a footnote corresponding to the Calais departure that said (in effect, although not as comprehensibly as this): ‘These are the timings of the Flèche d’Or, and you will be on this train to begin with.’ But were you on the Flèche d’Or if you were sitting in a sleeper carriage destined to hook up with the Blue Train? When, in fact, did the Flèche d’Or become the Blue Train? At Calais? At Gare du Nord? At Gare de Lyon? All these questions can also be asked in relation to other W-L services, such as the Rome Express, and the Simplon Orient Express, because sleepers for these might be attached to the Flèche d’Or along with the sleeper for the Blue Train. And there were other, additional methods of getting all of these sleeper cars from Calais to Gare de Lyon.

  What each movement had in common was a trip around the Petite Ceinture. So these British passengers of the mid-twentieth century did not have to make the ‘change at Paris’ themselves; it was done for them while they remained in their seats.

  THE REAL MYSTERY OF THE BLUE TRAIN

  You might say that these passengers were being treated like freight, because most of the other trains on the Ceinture by the 1930s would have been carrying freight. And from 1943, there were no passenger trains at all on the Ceinture, except for the sleeper carriage transfers, which began to fizzle out in the early 1970s. (The Cook’s timetable for 1971 has given up on Calais as far as the Blue Train is concerned: it is unequivocally shown as beginning from Paris-Gare de Lyon.)

  This backstage journey around the Ceinture in its twilight years is mysterious, ill-documented, a half-hour disappearance into a smoky limbo, lines with high cuttings governed by obscure signals and operational procedures, which was all very useful for Agatha Christie when she came to write The Mystery of the Blue Train – at which point I must introduce a ‘proceed at caution’, a ‘spoiler alert’. Anyone who hasn’t read the book, and thinks they might want to read it, should skip the next paragraph.

  The fact is that the murderer in that story commits his crime while the carriage for the Blue Train is being taken around the Ceinture from Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon. This is why the book was originally called The Mystery of the Blue Carriage. The killer boards the train on the Ceinture, does the evil deed, then alights. But how does he get on or off the train? This is the true mystery of The Mystery of the Blue Train. It is not explained. This is surely a fault of the book, wh
ich as a whole is too long, while the exposition is too short.

  Two things can be said in Christie’s defence. Firstly, she did not like the book herself. In her autobiography, she writes, ‘I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train, but I got it written and sent off to the publishers … Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of clichés, with an uninteresting plot. Many people, I am sorry to say, like it.’ Secondly, there is something admirable about the sheer confidence of an author who can discharge the crucial plot point in eleven words: ‘He boarded the train somewhere on its way around the Ceinture.’

  The Petite Ceinture was a function of the rail enthusiasm of Napoleon III. It was opened in 1854, and ran around the inside of what was then the city wall, connecting – for military-strategic reasons – the main-line termini, which until then had stood aloof from one another, all serving discrete territories, regional monopolies that nowhere overlapped. The line fell into eclipse from the 1920s, its usefulness undermined by the creation of the Métro, and it dwindled over the subsequent seventy years.

  The Ceinture remains, as a ghost railway, without any trains, except for occasional ‘special movements’ between Parisian termini. In its heyday, the Parisians were proud of the line, and segments of it formed scenic features in two Parisian parks, one to the south and one to the north, the southern one being Parc Montsouris (take RER line B to Cité Universitaire in the south of Paris). Ian Nairn liked the park, and described it in Nairn’s Paris as having ‘a delicious comic-opera flavour … everything preposterous in the happiest way: lake, hilly slopes, curly lampstandards’.