The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How do I love thee, trains?
Romance, epic journeys, leisurely dining – nothing beats the charged expectation of rail travel, says Griff Rhys Jones
Stride up the platform of Amsterdam Centraal. March through the gothic splendours of St Pancras. Strut into the Chinesebuilt wonder of Dar es Salaam station, or the fake Moorish palaces of Algiers, made with taste and delicacy by Parisian architects in thrall to the romance of trains. And do wallow in that romance. My first visit to the Gare du Nord? Those platform notices! “Berlin. Warsaw. Moscow.” From this place? Wow. I was only going to the station buffet, but I immediately longed to go on and light out for the territory.
The boat train may have long departed. The last great night trains left the platform when I was still playing with my Hornby Double-O. But railway travel can still be the essence of proper, adult, historic adventure. It was the first way that many of us could explore the world at speed, carrying a luggage of charged expectation. Much of that excitement remains.
I offered to make a TV series on the train-thriller-novel. Start at Victoria in London, in the shadow of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Take that cross-Channel Euro, past The Riddle of the Sands, on to Paris and Ashenden and First World War skulduggery. Then a night train to Munich and for Rogue Male, running alongside Murder on the Multiple Expresses with Agatha Christie, before plunging on to Vienna for Graham Greene (who decided that his first avowedly commercial novel Stamboul Train had to be set on the railway). Fleming and Ambler and Buchan are all rail-based: the fights, the “papers please”, the mysterious strangers. The climbing on the carriage roofs (I have done that, both in a sketch and for real, actually). Why is Jason Bourne always running around stations? Because Ludlum wrote the original stories when all great journeys across Europe could still be made by train.
How do I love thee, trains? Let me count the ways. First up is undoubtedly that proper “railway romance” but alongside that go all the other advantages. Such as being able to read as I travel. If they offer to send me a car, these days, I ask for a train ticket. Who wants a fake leather banquette, a driver’s miserable aftershave and Heart FM? I have a Pavlovian obsession with the relationship between a book and a carriage. I will deliberately miss a train if I don’t have reading matter in my hand. You can’t study properly in the back of a car.
Thirdly, I love it that you simply board. You just get on a train. Catch Me If You Can may purport to be that impossible thing: a romantic air travel film (and who wouldn’t want to be Leonardo with his armful of hostesses?) but he’s flying the damn thing. The rest of the air travel films are all, quite rightly, airport disasters or farces. Shuffle, wait, shuffle some more, queue, shuffle and then creep aboard through a tin tube. It’s a process, not a pleasure.
Any worthwhile, private railway adventure will need all these elements, like arriving in the very centre of the town (that’s love number four), jumping straight out of your seat and into the action, whether it’s in Sydney or Oslo. And don’t forget (love number five) that a train gives you the opportunity to settle, inhabit and explore it en route. Perhaps not as much as the American grunt on that slow, jolting journey back to London after the Edinburgh Festival in 1973, who scratched his armpits, took off his boots to settle his smelly feet on my seat and went to sleep. But trains have character.
Transcontinental dining cars in Australia emulate the Wild West. (They sport engraved glass dividing panels between the tables.) In the actual Wild West, Canadian carriages are out of Bauhaus Germany. Germany itself built the fading beige Formica-clad sleeper compartments that carry you through the night from Nairobi to Mombasa in abandoned glamour. The mirrors may be held together with Sellotape, but they reflect perfect if worn linen and a lost world of service from the 1950s. No hostess bossy air-nannies here, just softly spoken concern. Take a stroll along the dinky Chinese carriage corridors in Zambia. You will eventually find the bar with its three large, unmatched G Plan sofas plonked down randomly and upholstered in unmatching leopard skin, orange and blue velour. And in South Africa, crossing the Garden State, I actually took a bath in my cabin.
Don’t forget love six. Great, long, luxury transcontinental trains let you know you are aboard and stuck there for the interim. It is a meditative process. I don’t particularly yearn for highspeed in Britain. I like slow cooking.
There is that West Coast Caledonian line sleeper, with its strange banging about at five in the morning in the suburbs of Glasgow, but for the most part we don’t “journey” by rail in this country. Despite the wonderful branch lines (take in the Welsh Marches, from Newport to Shrewsbury one day), we are too small a country to celebrate “railway limbo”. Proper rail travel is a bill of divorcement from the world. What can you do, except exist – reasonably comfortably and separately – and enjoy the trip? All air flights crash to earth in a hurry. Cars bang on. But trains can dawdle across continents. And they often do so, through incredible country or past endless intriguing back gardens.
That’s love seven. Travel by plane and you see the sky. It’s all a bit samey. Travel by car and you never leave the
In South Africa, crossing the Garden State, I actually took a bath in my cabin
road, or other roads, or intersections of roads, or road signs, road manners and road hogs or bumpers. Only on a train can you be oblivious to your mode of travel as you gaze down on the real world flashing by.
I have been lucky enough to take some excellent scenic railways. The NZ South Island Tranzalpine. Bergen to Oslo across the Hardanger Plateau. The night train from Cologne down to Vienna, where the golden lights of the Rhine sparkled outside my window as I struggled into my pyjamas. Rhodes’ Victoria Falls Bridge across the Zambezi. The Nullarbor and the banana plantations of north Queensland. But, let’s face it, I have hardly made a scratch on the available surface of the Earth. That’s the big love. Number eight. Plenty more rail trips to go.
Read more of Griff Rhys Jones’s travel writing at telegraph.co.uk/tt-griff
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