Night Trains Read online

  We arrived in Nice dead on time at 08.37. The guard’s parting announcement wished us, not a ‘bonne journée’, but a ‘belle journée’, which train guards on the Riviera are entitled to do with some confidence.

  From the station, I walked for five minutes to a big block of flats called, according to the notice on the gatepost, Number 2 Boulevard de Cimiez. If I had been a wealthy traveller before the First World War, I might have been staying here, because it used to be the Cimiez Riviera Palace Hotel, built by Georges Nagelmackers in 1891 and opened in 1895 (The Continental Traveller reported that ‘it had been wisely left to dry before being opened to the public’). Some of the more exuberant art nouveau flourishes have been lopped off since then, but it’s still a vast white wedding cake of a building, albeit one that seems slightly dismayed by the incessant roar of traffic along the Boulevard de Cimiez.

  The first foreign visitors to Nice – the English – didn’t come for the beach and the sea, but for such humble requirements as the absence of damp. Cimiez, on an upland above the town, was the favoured spot, and Queen Victoria had her villa there. Nice must have been a melancholic place, full of frail people demanding of the town that it make them better. A consumptive called the Rev. Henry Lyte went there in fruitless search of better health, and he was in Nice when he wrote the hymn ‘Abide With Me’, whose second verse contains the line ‘Change and decay in all around I see’. (I had always assumed that was written in some dark, satanic British mill town.)

  The railway connection to Paris came in the 1860s, and gradually turned Nice into the kind of place Queen Victoria didn’t like. The same had happened with Brighton, which she had initially favoured, but she found the railway brought in people who were ‘very indiscreet and troublesome’. Modern Nice is reminiscent of Brighton: the beach is stony, the dome of the Hotel Negresco is like the dome of the Pavilion, and Nice is rackety like Brighton. At ten o’clock in the morning the cafés of the Promenade des Anglais feature plenty of peroxide blondes having champagne with their breakfast croissants, often with a palpitating lap dog (which also seems to be a peroxide blonde) slumped under the seat. Some of them are Russian.

  The Russians have enjoyed coming to Nice since pre-Revolutionary times. The Russian Orthodox church behind the station is a reminder of this. Nagelmackers catered to the Russian market with the St Petersburg-Vienna-Nice-Cannes Express, which first ran on 15 November 1898. At 18.00 on Sundays it left St Petersburg for Warsaw, to meet the Vienna-Nice Express. It left Warsaw for Vienna at 17.50 on the Monday. On arrival at Vienna, it was shunted from the Nordbahnhof to the Südbahnhof. The train arrived in Nice at 14.19 on the Wednesday. It was known for its formality, being one of the last on which passengers dressed for dinner.

  In 2010, another sleeper train began running between Moscow and Nice via Warsaw. The Nice Express is operated by Russian Railways, RZD; it provides the longest continuous train journey available in Europe, and runs only in summer. The second longest is also provided by RZD: from Paris Gare de l’Est to Moscow, which runs all year round, and started in 2011. Russia has a broad gauge, and both trains switch gauges at Brest, so these are heroic enterprises, in the Wagons-Lits mould, with luxurious sleeping accommodation. At the time of writing the plan is for a couple of the sleepers from the Moscow-Nice service to be attached to the Paris-Nice Intercité de Nuit, for travel at premium rates. Passengers in these carriages will be loaned tablets, on which they can download entertainment, as happens on the Russian sleepers. This scheme offers a small prospect of a reprieve to the descendant of the Blue Train.

  2

  THE NORDLAND RAILWAY

  THE NIGHTCAP

  Ten o’clock on a late June evening in Trondheim, halfway up the coast of Norway. I was sitting in the penthouse bar of my hotel, looking down on a rainswept marshalling yard ten storeys below. A shunter was pushing some flatbed wagons about, some of them carrying green containers marked ‘BRING’. That morning, I’d had a tour of Trondheim, and the guide had apologised for the marshalling yard. ‘We’re thinking of moving that,’ she’d said, ‘it’s such an eyesore.’ But you can’t just shift a marshalling yard. You need a railway line to feed it, for one thing, and this particular marshalling needed to be by the sea, or rather the Trondheim Fjord – indistinguishable from the open sea – whose container vessels it serves.

  The shunter had its headlights switched on, which perhaps helped with visibility in the rain, but darkness had not fallen, and would not be falling because this was midsummer, the time of the midnight sun. The sky had merely turned violet, with lingering hints of orange, while the heavy rain generally blurred the issue. I was feeling disoriented and slightly drunk. This was my third glass of Riesling, in spite of the fact that each glass had cost about ten pounds. The Norwegian state does not trust its citizens not to drink to excess, and so taxes alcohol heavily. Other disapproved-of commodities, such as cosmetics and cars, are also heavily taxed. On the other hand, social services are well funded, so that Norway scores high on quality of life indexes, and the British visitor has the impression of being in a more sensible country than his homeland.

  I was in Norway because of a conversation at a funeral. My father, a lifelong railwayman, died in June 2015, a fortnight after I returned from my trip on the remnant of the Blue Train, and the story of my misadventures en route to the Riviera had caused him to nod politely in his hospital bed, rather than laugh, as I had been hoping. As we drove away from the crematorium, one of his friends – also ex-BR and a former member of the British Railwaymen’s Touring Club – recommended a trip on the Nordland Railway in Norway. ‘You can see half the country in ten hours, and we’ve nothing over here to compare. I’ve been on the West Highland Line, Settle-Carlisle Railway, the Cornish Main Line – they’re London-to-Croydon in comparison with the Nordland.’ He knew about my interest in sleepers, and he explained that there were both day and night trains along the Nordland, with the condition that there was no ‘night’ in north Norway in midsummer.

  I had not planned on going to Norway, but it was certainly within my chosen area – which is to say that it was shown on the badge of the British Railwaymen’s Touring Club – and the full extent of the Nordland Line was there on my European Railway Map, albeit on the separate Scandinavian pull-out. But surely Norway was not a very fertile railway territory? With its 2,580 miles of track, it takes up four pages of the European Railway Timetable. Britain, with its 9,188 miles, takes up 128 pages, yet Norway is almost twice as big as Britain.

  Railways came late to Scandinavia. Denmark started track-laying in 1847, Norway in 1854, Sweden two years after that. As Christian Wolmar writes in Blood, Iron & Gold, ‘The reason for their tardiness was obvious. These were poor and sparsely populated countries with a harsh climate that was not conducive to railway construction. Norway, for example, had just 2 million people in the middle of the nineteenth century, spread over a vast country eking out a living from agriculture, timber and fishing.’

  But the terrain that made the railways difficult to build also made them beautiful. An English-language booklet issued by the national operator, NSB, is confidently entitled ‘Enjoy Norway by Train’. The west-east Bergen-Oslo Railway is billed as ‘Perhaps the most spectacular scenic experience in Europe’. In 2010, a branch line off it, the Flam Railway, ‘was named one of Europe’s 10 most scenic train journeys by the National Geographic Traveller Magazine’, while the Rauma Railway (Åndalsnes-Dombås) ‘stands at the top of Lonely Planet’s awards for Europe’s most beautiful railway journeys’. The Nordland does not miss out: ‘Lonely Planet has named this line as one of the world’s most beautiful night train journeys.’ Night trains also operate on the Bergen-Oslo, Oslo-Trondheim and Oslo-Kristiansand-Stavanger routes, and all of these sleepers operate under the banner of NSB Sove (‘sove’ meaning sleep).

  The four night trains of Norway appear to have a secure future, just as the two in Britain do. This is nothing to do with being at arm’s length from the European Union, but ra
ther because the trains all operate within a single territory. In Britain this arises from the country being an island, and Norway might as well be an island because it only has a railway connection to one other country, Sweden, and while there is one ‘international’ sleeper between the two, it is a Swedish train. The more countries that are involved in running a sleeper service, the greater the chance of it being stopped, because one of them might pull the plug, sleepers being inherently uneconomical. But as Chris Jackson, editor of the Railway Gazette International, puts it, ‘If there’s only one national operator involved, they might decide to take the hit, either for social or patriotic reasons.’ But does the healthy condition of Norwegian sleepers owe anything to a Wagons-Lits heritage? Had there ever been a ‘Norwegian Blue’, so to speak?

  It turns out that Wagons-Lits did once have a fingertip in Norway. The Norway connection was a spin-off from the Nord Express, a particularly ambitious project even by Nagelmackers’ standards. The Nord Express began running in 1896, as a Paris-St Petersburg service. The aim was to join it to the Sud Express – which, as we will see, ran from Paris to Lisbon – to create a vertical counterpart to the horizontal Orient Express. But the Nord was at the mercy of politics to a much greater extent than the remarkably constant Sud Express. After the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Warsaw became the northerly terminus of the Nord, and by the 1950s it had become a train from Paris to various places in Scandinavia. After rereading a certain paragraph about this late-period Nord Express about six times – it was written by George Behrend, always much clearer about railway dinners than railway routes – I divined that it had gone into Norway from 9 June 1953. ‘This lasted until May 26th 1962,’ Behrend wrote, before suddenly, and characteristically, lobbing away the fine brush and picking up the broad one, ‘when Wagons-Lits ceased to run in Norway.’ Why did it cease to run? He does not say, but presumably aeroplanes had something to do with it.

  The Nord Express had entered Denmark via Jutland, rather than by the Baltic Sea. It then crossed the bridge at Fredericia, gaining Funen (the central island of Denmark) where it called at Odense. The train was then put onto the Nyborg-Korsør train ferry across the Grand Belt to Zealand, the island on which Copenhagen is situated. Some of the carriages would continue from Copenhagen to Malmö in Sweden by means of the train ferry, which service has now been replaced by the Øresund Bridge, which we will be returning to in the chapter on the Berlin Night Express. From Malmö, most of the Nord Express continued to Stockholm, but a few carriages went to the subsidiary destination of Oslo. At the preserved Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough, which accommodates vehicles with foreign loading gauges, they are restoring one of the Wagons-Lits sleeping cars that had sometimes gone to Oslo. Generally referred to by the volunteers as ‘Number 3916’, it is fading from light to dark blue under its tarpaulin as a campaign proceeds to raise the funds for refurbishment.

  So the blue coaches did reach Oslo, but they certainly never reached Trondheim, which is over 300 miles north of Oslo. Still less did they reach Bodø, terminus of the Nordland, which is nearly 450 miles from Trondheim. But there was an elemental appeal about the trip.

  Bodø is a pleasingly emphatic terminus. When the Nordland reached that town in 1962, that was the completion of the Norwegian network. Another 600 miles of Norway lie beyond Bodø, but terrain, weather and lack of demand conspired against any extension of the line. The idea of going to Bodø on the day train and coming back on the night train was also appealing: the symmetry of it. Admittedly, this would be complicated by travelling in midsummer. Instead of comparing day with night, I would be comparing day with the witchy twilight of the midnight sun. But how often does one have the chance to make a night train journey in the light?

  KOMFORT CLASS

  After the night-that-never-was, the rain still fell. At 6.50am, I set off from my hotel for Trondheim Central Station, with a slight feeling of guilt at being about to leave the place after only half a day.

  The centre of Trondheim is built along two waterways: a canal and the river Nid, both of which are lined with old warehouses painted in a strangely harmonious palette of faded browns, dull greens, rust reds, mustard yellows. The buildings are rather wavy and bulging, like their own reflections in the water. Trondheim suffered from repeated fires, and in 1681 it was apparently ‘turned to ashes’ … which is hard to credit, Trondheim seeming to be such a watery place, what with the rain that had been falling since my arrival, and the proximity of the great, grey fjord.

  The tour guide had been full of civic pride, and armed with plenty of facts, some of which she would transcribe in my notebook. Trondheim, she had explained, was the most northerly city (as opposed to town) in the country; it was also the second oldest and the third largest. She seemed reluctant to discuss my intended destination on the Nordland Railway – Bodø – except to say that it takes twenty-one hours to get there on a ferry, forty-five minutes on a plane, or ten hours on the train. The train, she implied, was the poor relation. In a country with over 50,000 miles of coastline, boats and ships were always the main mode, inhibiting railway-building. The development of the roads then had the same effect, and the Nordland Railway shadows the Arctic Highway rather than the other way around.

  The guide’s relentless focus was Trondheim itself, or its rural hinterland, Trøndelag. Had I considered going sightseeing on a hired bike? Or a bus could take me into those beautiful wooded hills to the south in half an hour. Did I know that the Gulf Stream keeps the fjord ice-free? On Saturday, there would be a farmers’ market. She pointed out the Trondheim Town Hall, the Trondheim flag flying from its roof, and the Royal residence where the king lives, sometimes. (It was an elegant late-eighteenth-century house, with vagrants sleeping in the garden, which seemed admirably democratic.)

  ***

  Trondheim Central Station is elegant and pastel-coloured, like most of the city. The main building is Italianate, and pale yellow. It is a fulcrum of the railways in this vertically long country, in that it forms the terminus of the Dovre Line, running south to Oslo, and the Nordland, running north to Bodø. (There is also a commuter line that heads east across Norway and into Sweden.) The Dovre is electrified, the Nordland is not. In the absence of any Lonely Planet superlatives for the Dovre, NSB offer the following: ‘The landscape along the Dovre railway is very varied in both topography and vegetation, which is not unexpected for a route with a height difference of 960 metres and a high point of 1,025 metres above sea level.’ (Height above sea level is an obsession with NSB, as we will see.)

  The Nordland train awaited: six red carriages and a red Di 4 diesel locomotive. A diesel loco is the exception rather than the norm in Norway, where more than half the lines are electrified, and there are plans to electrify the Nordland.

  In Norway, Changing and Changeless (1939), Agnes Rothery wrote, of Norwegian railway carriages:

  These are built in compartments and are so similar to the English model that one is a little surprised to be warned that ‘sigaretter’ and ‘sigarer’ are not to be ‘kast ut’ of the ‘vinduet’ … Not only does the ‘konduktor’ speak better English than the cockney Englishman … but the passengers with their zipper bags and spectacles look entirely familiar, as do the people waiting on the platforms, lapping ice cream cones or sucking soft drinks through a straw out of a bottle.

  But in summer 2015, many cultural differences were evident at Trondheim. In the station shop, commuters had apples or raw peeled carrots along with their newspapers, rather than grab bags of crisps and coffee, which is the English way. The train was being boarded by a few executive types, who didn’t look as though they were intending to cross the Arctic Circle, but also by people who looked as if they would be taking that landmark in their stride: literally, in the case of a party of retirees, all coming along the platform in expensive-looking quilted jackets, while walking with two sticks, like cross-country skiers. I was half irritated, half jealous of this prosperous, apparently happy nation, where even the n
ights are not dark for some of the year.

  My ticket was for a seat in ‘Komfort’ Class, denoting an open carriage that was grey, very clean, and if anything slightly too spacious (the tables were too far away from the seats). The carriage windows were also exceptionally big. I took out my iPad to test the free Wi-Fi. ‘Have a good trip,’ said the message that immediately popped up. ‘You are logged in.’ And it was telling the truth, whereas when you get that message on a British train, you are usually not logged in, despite having yielded up all your personal details.

  As we pulled away from Trondheim – at 07.38 – I looked for another seat, because I was sitting with my back to the engine. I moved into a window seat facing the direction of travel, but this turned out to have been booked by a late-boarding executive, a completely grey, silent man who stood over me until I vacated the seat. While I returned to my original place, he sat down and began typing on his laptop, never once glancing through the window. Perhaps he had become blasé through living in a country with such scenic railways, just as the Parisians never look up from their newspapers when they cross the Seine on the Métro bridges.

  The Nordland would be stopping twenty-seven times, but it passes through more stations than it stops at, including – twenty miles north of Trondheim – the one called Hell, which is probably the most famous and widely photographed small station in the world. Hell means ‘cave’ in Old Norse and tourists like to be photographed under the sign reading ‘Hell Gods-Expedition’, which means ‘freight service’ or ‘cargo handling’. As we passed the station, some young people on the platform had the temerity to be laughing, even though they were in Hell. The next station, and the first stop, was Trondheim Airport. (‘The fourth busiest in Norway,’ the meticulous tour guide had informed me.)