Night Trains Read online

  We now entered deep countryside. The chalet-like houses and station buildings were usually either maroon or mustard yellow. Under the grey sky, the lush farmland of Trøndelag was a vivid green that put British grass to shame. Sometimes the train, on its single track, seemed to be threading through farmyards; there were never any fences, Norway being such a civilised and trusting place. (The many bikes, on the passing station platforms, tended to have been left unlocked.) And there were hardly any people. The Norwegian flag often flew from the farmhouse roofs, as though the lonely occupants wanted to remind themselves who they were. The engine periodically whistled, as though trying to raise the dead. I was enjoying the journey, in the melancholic way described by W. N. P. Barbellion in The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919):

  A journey on a railway train makes me sentimental. If I enter the compartment a robust-minded, cheerful youth, fresh and whistling from a walk by the sea, yet, as soon as I am settled down in one corner and the train is rattling along past fields, woods, towns, and painted stations, I find myself indulging in a saccharine sadness – very toothsome and jolly.

  As we approached any given station, there would be a quiet, relaxed automatic announcement in Norwegian, followed by the translation: ‘We will be arriving at [whatever the next station might be] in five or six minutes.’ At each arrival, the time and the outside temperature would be displayed on the dot matrix screen at the end of the carriage, together with another figure, to be discussed shortly.

  Some stations were at the head of branch lines leading to ports, because the Nordland begins by skirting a fjord. There is the same thrilling proximity of rail and sea that you get on the Cornish main line at Dawlish, but that’s over after five minutes, whereas this lasts for a hundred miles. I asked the middle-aged Norwegian man in the next seat (he was drinking something probably very healthy from a high-spec flask) what this fjord was called. ‘Trondheim Fjord,’ he said. He took pleasure in leaning across to me twice more in the next hour, and saying, ‘Still Trondheim Fjord,’ and pointing through the window. His name was Larry, and he was dressed for the great outdoors in neatly pressed lumberjack shirt and combat trousers.

  On the eastern side appeared the beginnings of what was to become a vertiginous gorge. ‘Namsen river,’ explained Larry, who was now eating a fascinatingly well-organised lunch from a green Perspex lunchbox that had separate compartments for cold meat, cheese, berries, yoghurt. His bike was in the baggage van, he explained, and he would be ‘touring the Bodø district, as I do every year’.

  I walked to the buffet through a crowded family carriage that was bathed – for some doubtless very good reason – in orange light. There was a kind of romper room in the corner, with a climbing frame, a padded floor and an indestructible-looking TV looping cartoons. The class status of the family carriage was unclear, but the next one along was definitely a ‘second’ or ‘økonomi’. It was the same as ‘Komfort’ but with smaller seats. The European Timetable says of Norway, ‘All trains convey second-class accommodation. Many trains also convey NSB Komfort accommodation.’ In other words, not all trains have first class.

  The buffet was spacious and ultra-clean, with red leather transverse benches. The female attendant recommended a Norwegian pork stew called lapskaus that was both traditional and gluten free. It was also delicious, although it came on a rather bendy paper plate. I bought a coffee and took it back to my carriage, whereupon Larry looked up from the map he was perusing on his tablet and enquired, ‘You bought that?’ Pointing to a vending machine, he said, ‘No need. Coffee is free in Komfort Class.’ (There were also free newspapers on a rack by the coffee machine, but they were in Norwegian.)

  The forested hills became snow-capped mountains. The station buildings now had a plainer, more austere look, having been built by the occupying Germans in 1940, whereas the previous ones had been built by Norwegians in the early twentieth century. The story of how the Nordland developed after the 1930s is salutary, and makes the traveller feel slightly ashamed at being in Komfort Class …

  ***

  An article about Norway appearing in Railway Wonders of the World in 1935, gives a jolly survey of engineering difficulties overcome in ways likely to be appreciated by the schoolboy reader. After a long survey of the Rauma Railway, the Nordland merits only a paragraph, since it was, at the time, mainly a projected railway. The line north from Trondheim had reached Hell by 1881; by 1929 it was at Grong, a hundred miles north of Trondheim:

  Work is proceeding [wrote the anonymous author] at the time of writing on a further extension which will carry the Nordland still further north to Bodø, a town within the Arctic Circle. Here, the fisheries of the Lofoten Islands – where all the major part of the Norwegian cod and herring fishing is carried on – will greatly benefit from being able to put their catches on rail as near to the islands as Bodø, and the transport of fish southwards will be greatly expedited.

  But it would be the occupying Nazis who would push the line northwards, and not for the benefit of the fishermen of Bodø. The Luftwaffe would have other plans for Bodø, as we will see, and the line would not reach there until 1962 in any case. The Germans extended the line to Dunderland, thirty miles short of the Arctic Circle, as part of the infrastructure necessary to create ‘Fortress Norway’. Hitler believed that the Norwegian coast, especially the north coast, was the ‘zone of destiny’, and the defence of it against an Allied attack was prioritised even over the defence of the German coast. The Germans used slave labour to build the line: 20,000 prisoners of war, mainly Russians, Yugoslavs and Poles. At least 10 per cent died of exposure, overwork or starvation, and these men were buried at the lineside.

  Our train started to climb, until we were at an angle more usually associated with Swiss railways. The trees became thinner, then disappeared entirely. All was grey rock and snow, our train moving silently, like some lunar vehicle. There came an announcement, not automatic, and more urgent than the laid-back ones hitherto: ‘Your attention please! We are about to cross the Arctic Circle.’ Stone pyramids on either side of the track marked the spot.

  Approaching Røkland, greenery reappeared, but with much greyness persisting, in the form of rocky cliffs and a grey eagle flying lazily over some raging rapids. At Fauske, the majority of those left on the train got off. Larry, who had been listening to music on expensive headphones, briefly removed them (classical music seeping out) in order to explain, ‘Quarrying town.’ No more than a couple of dozen remained for the Bodø termination, including Larry, who took my picture on the platform.

  The railway void north of Bodø is perhaps to be considered precious. In their book, The Northern Utopia, Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A. Symes quote Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s mother, who visited Norway on her honeymoon in 1852: ‘owing to the nature of this country, railways can never be universal, and this is fortunate, as Norway must remain sacred to nature, and the picturesque, and the poet’.

  BODØ

  It is possible to progress north from Bodø by bus. As the European Rail Timetable explains, a bus runs to Narvik, nearly 200 miles north, but you wouldn’t hop on it casually, because the footnote also reads: ‘Journey time: four and a half hours.’ You can take a train to Narvik, but for that you must first go to Sweden. A sleeper from Stockholm departs at 17.55. It is apparently a very comfortable one, and reindeer stew is a dinner option. Arrival at Narvik is at 14.18 the next day, and if this sounds like a chance for a long lie-in, the timetable warns passengers they may be ejected from their beds to travel in seated accommodation some three hours before Narvik, at Kiruna. The mines at Kiruna are the reason the line exists: to carry iron ore from there to Narvik, which is ice-free all year round because of the Gulf Stream. In 1935, Railway Wonders of the World said of the line from Vassijaure (on the Swedish border) to Narvik, ‘It is curious to reflect that on a line like this signal lights and engine headlamps never need to be lighted for a considerable period in the summer, and can never be extinguished for an equal period in the win
ter.’

  I had asked Larry what I ought to do with the evening and day I would have in Bodø before boarding the night train back. ‘It’s a great base to explore the country!’ he had said. The booklet advertising NSB Sove services had been similarly evasive: ‘The location is an excellent base for glacier hiking in Norway’s largest glacier, Svartisen, or for a trip to the portentous Saltstraumen, the world’s most powerful tidal stream. Bodø is also the ideal stopover for a trip by ferry over to the majestic Lofoten archipelago.’

  But what of Bodø itself?

  Walking away from the station, passing 1960s buildings of the kind you tend to see in the outskirts of English towns like Hull, I kept thinking I would soon be in the pretty, historic heart of Bodø.

  It soon became obvious that no such quaintness would be appearing. This is because old Bodø was flattened by the Luftwaffe on 27 May 1940, by way of punishment for harbouring a force of British fighters, and an airstrip used by the Allies. The close presence of the sea is a compensation, along with the beautiful snow-capped islands and mountains that seem to be encroaching from all directions, and which look somehow incongruously romantic, like scenery wheeled on from a different play.

  I checked into my hotel, built in the 1970s, with all the architectural charm that implies, but the staff were very pleasant. I then walked around town in a gentle drizzle. Fishing and tourism are the main industries. Bodø, it is fair to say, is obsessed with fish, and there is a tourist attraction called the Salmon Centre, which prompted thoughts of the late Peter Cook, who would occasionally amuse himself (and others) by phoning up a London radio station in the guise of Sven from Swiss Cottage, a lovelorn fisherman originally from Norway. ‘In Norway,’ Sven explained on air, ‘the phone-ins is mainly devoted to subject like, you know, fish, when people ring up for one hour, and the gist of it is, “A carp is very big … Is a tench very big?” and on and on all night.’ I dined on a well-cooked halibut in a restaurant in a shopping mall, where a half bottle of white wine was only about eighteen pounds, then went early to bed.

  The next morning, I walked to the Nordlands Museum, which stands opposite the austere 1950s cathedral. Here, a film shown on a loop in a darkened room tells the story of Bodø, and how a charming-looking fishing village (although it apparently did stink of fish) was flattened in ten minutes by that bombing raid. It is remarkable that only fifteen people died out of a population of 6,000. The film was heartbreaking in its absence of self-pity (‘Some people say the new architecture is boring …’), but the jaunty voice-over begged to differ, boasting of how Bodø cracked the problem of shopping in bad weather. It built shopping arcades under glass roofs: shopping malls! There was also touching footage of the celebrations surrounding the coming of the railway.

  With this in mind, Bodø Station appeared in a different light that evening: less a bland, municipal-looking edifice, and more like the precious connection between Bodø and the world. On one of the platforms is a plaque commemorating the opening of the station on 7 June 1962, and the little garden alongside it is well tended. The actual railway line had arrived a year earlier, and many photographs of both events are displayed in a permanent exhibition inside the station building.

  THE CONTINUATION OF THE DAY

  At 8.30pm, the station booking hall was closed, but the waiting area was filling up. There were two extremely beautiful young women, one stretched out on a bench, the other reading to her from a Kindle. There was an elderly American couple: both wore baggy white trousers, multi-pocketed waistcoats and white bush hats with dangling flaps that made them look like a pair of beekeepers. They were both intently studying their iPhones, and it was hard to believe the content of the one phone differed much from the other. As on the Blue Train I had a press ticket, and had not wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth by asking if I would be sharing. I knew I would not likely be sharing with the beekeepers, as they were surely travelling together, and the one thing I knew about the accommodation on the Nordland night train was that it was a proper sleeper, so the compartments held two berths each, as on the Wagons-Lits trains, rather than four or six, as in couchette carriages.

  I began watching a man eating beans cold from a can. He wore very short shorts, sandals and an army shirt. At least he was not committing the solecism of wearing socks with his sandals, I thought, but then I saw his socks (black, ankle-length) drying out on a heating pipe behind him. Ominously – yet perfectly understandably – he was travelling alone, and he went down as the person I most particularly did not want to share with.

  The train – due to depart at 21.10 – was already at the platform, under a drizzling rain. There were seven carriages, including two sleepers. It would be stopping at most, but not quite all, of the stations the day train had stopped at. A small Norwegian man, carrying an old-fashioned canvas rucksack, was also walking along the platform. What follows is a literal transcription of our conversation. I am the first speaker:

  ‘You are taking this train?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Do you often take it?’

  ‘Of course; it is my home.’

  ‘Where are you going?

  ‘I don’t know.’ But after a while he said, ‘Steinkjer.’

  ‘You live there?’

  ‘In the morning.’

  At nine o’clock, the doors of the train were unlocked, and we passengers were admitted. Signs on the doors to the sleeping compartments read, ‘Entrance to the berth is by keycard. Please collect your card from the conductor in the restaurant car’, and moreover the conductor was waiting, as billed, in the restaurant car. So it was obvious that here was a well-organised and secure sleeper service. Taking the keycard, I asked the conductor whether I’d be sharing. He seemed shocked by this unprogressive idea: ‘If you are travelling alone, you always have the right to sleep alone.’

  The berth did not disappoint. It was cosy, orangey-brown; two bunks were made up and, as in a good hotel, there was a chocolate on the pillow. It was a good pillow too, and there was a proper mattress and excellent starched linen – and a decent-sized, fluffy towel. The rungs of the steel ladder were carpeted, as on the ‘Y’ class Wagons-Lits sleepers. There was a leaflet on the bed: ‘Taking the night train is a one-of-a-kind experience. Awake refreshed, and with a great rail experience behind you.’

  There was a sink in the corner. The eau was non-potable, but this was gracefully couched: ‘Please use the bottled water.’ A cup dispenser said ‘Cup’. A panel of light switches read ‘Lights’, with the sub-headings, ‘Assistance’, ‘Reading’ and ‘Ceiling’. There was no little hook on which to hang your wristwatch, as on the Wagons-Lits, but there was a slot marked ‘Keycard’, in which to put your keycard.

  The neighbours were very wholesome: a family of four, who inhabited two compartments, the door between them having been unlocked. Just at that moment, they were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in Norwegian. When they had finished, the chef du train (and it was as though he had waited for them to finish) announced himself over the tannoy. He said something in Norwegian, followed by, ‘Welcome to our train. It will bring you to Trondheim. The café will be open all night.’

  I walked along to the café, partly because I couldn’t bear to muss the beautifully made-up bunks. After Fauske, the quarry town, where we stopped at 21.50, the light seemed to be growing stronger rather than fading. We had left the rain behind, and the sky was a deep gold above bright-green fields. Some horses ran away from the train; cattle looked up. Did they know it was night? It was as though time had stopped. Maybe that’s what happens when a country stays outside the European Union. Lights twinkled from the windows of the occasional houses we passed, but these were like the lights on a model railway layout – apparently switched on as a kind of special effect rather than because they were necessary. We stopped at Valnesfjord, a request stop on the water’s edge. One man got off, with a backpack, and he looked like he would be needing it, because he walked straight off the platform into the woods. The do
t matrix display at the end of the car gave the time. It also read ‘3m OH’. As the female train guard was coming along, I asked her what this meant. ‘It shows how high we are. As you can see, Valnesfjord is very nearly in the sea. Our maximum point is Stødi, just inside the Arctic Circle, in the Saltfjellet Mountains. It is 680 metres above sea level.’

  An hour later, during which I had eaten a ham-and-cheese sandwich and drunk a Diet Coke (a quarter bottle of Chardonnay being twelve pounds), the sky had turned violet, and we were entering the moonscape again. We rolled past a small station: Stødi, the highest point. That meant the Arctic Circle was imminent. The guard was passing again, and I asked whether she would be making an announcement. ‘No announcement,’ she said, smiling. ‘Of course, because people are sleeping.’

  There was only one other passenger in the dining car: a heavily made-up woman in leopard-skin tights. She had invested in an entire bottle of red wine, which must have cost fifty pounds, and it was fuelling some pretty frenetic texting. Having passed the Arctic Circle, we were descending steeply; trees were reappearing, but they were unhealthy specimens, and some had toppled into the arms of others, like fallen comrades. Fast streams of white water hurtled towards the tracks at right angles from either side, as though with malicious intent, but at the last minute, they were diverted into stone channels going beneath the line.

  The texter’s phone now rang. I had assumed she was Norwegian, but she answered speaking English in an Australian accent, and the conversation was surprisingly laid-back. ‘We’ve just passed the Arctic Circle,’ she said casually, almost yawning. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘it’s not the Northern Lights, it’s just northern light … Do you want to meet me at the station? It’s up to you. You don’t have to. I get in at 07.17.’ But then things did start to get a bit heavy. ‘Look,’ she said, quite loudly, ‘you’re talking to me as if I’m a healthy girl when you know perfectly well I’m not!’