44 Saturday December 18 2021 | the times
Comment
people who sell herbal tea in paper cups from a trolley
can’t match the clink of china and cut glass.
With real travel restricted, there should be no
shame in dreaming of old journeys that could once be
made, or new ones which might be made again. My
December copy of the European Rail timetable is in
the post now, the successor to the great Thomas Cook
volumes of the past. I’ll be reading it over Christmas,
stuck at home.
I have an edition from October 1989 which shows
how many routes pierced the Iron Curtain before it
fell — trains such as the Acropolis from Munich to
Athens, or the line from Italy into Yugoslavia, which
once carried another section of the Orient Express, a
train on which James Bond fought agents from
SPECTRE. Today Bond couldn’t do that. Even if Q
supplied him with Covid-secure documentation —
“You expect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you
to do a PCR test” — the rail link to Greece and
Turkey has been severed. Perhaps the ever-creative
Austrian railways will revive it.
Other overnight trains are coming back,
though. In Britain the Caledonian Sleeper
between London and Scotland has been
smartened up with new carriages: I
remember a knock at the door from the
steward in the last days of the old ones,
followed by his cry, “The deer are running!”
I opened the window blind to see big-
antlered beasts rushing through the snow
beside the train in the dawn light. At least
as fun is the last sleeper in England, from
Paddington to Cornwall.
There is a particular magic to sleeper
trains, which has little to do with
practicality. You can pretend you are
saving time and a hotel bill but the thrill
comes from the hoot of a train horn in
the night, the small hours spent half
awake, half dozing, the sense that just
the other side of a flimsy curtain liesweekend essay
With new lines opening, sleepers being revived and a route
now possible all the way from Europe to Singapore, this is
truly a golden age of train travel, says rail lover Julian Glover
A
ghost train left Vienna for Paris the other
night. Or rather, a real train but with no
real passengers, running on a route
haunted by the grand European expresses
of the past. Nightjet 468 is the 19.40 service
from Vienna’s swanky new Central Station, destined to
purr through the Bavarian night three times a week
via Salzburg, Munich and Strasbourg, before arriving
at stone-clad Gare de l’Est at 9.42 the next morning.
The new service, a sleeper train revived by Austria’s
national railway firm ÖBB, is bringing glamour back
to a line that once carried a branch of the Orient
Express. Sadly the first train ran this week as new
Covid restrictions hit: officials were on board, but the
comfortable sleeping car, complete with on-board
showers, cheaper couchettes with bunks and bargain-
price seats were all largely deserted. What should have
been a glorious moment for rail travel was marred, as
so much has been in the past two years.
France has sealed its border to most British tourists
and with that comes a further closing of possibilities.
No chance this Christmas of darting through the
Channel tunnel, walking from the Gare du Nord to
l’Est and joining the weekly Russian service to
Moscow, a two-night journey across four countries.
That train hasn’t run since the pandemic began.
Before Covid, 2021 was shaping up to be a great year
for international rail travel and, even in this dark
winter, there’s much we can look forward to in 2022.
Just this week we learnt that, thanks to the opening of
a new high-speed line through Laos, it’s possible to
travel by train from anywhere in western Europe all
the way to Singapore. Lisbon to Singapore is 11,650
miles and would take about three weeks with a dozen
changes of train, but it can be done.
I’d set off to try it tonight, if only the world wasn’t
closing in. From Singapore you can get to Sumatra by
ferry. There are a handful of trains on that vast
Indonesian island; more on Java, and from there you
can take a boat to Bali. That is as close to Australia as
you can get without flying: a frustrating gap but
imagine that journey through Russia and Asia,
watching the landscape and the people change
through successive time zones.
Make it to Darwin and you can join The Ghan,
which runs south for 53 hours through the desert to
Adelaide, 1,850 miles away. I caught it once from Alice
Springs; the only train I have been on that fleeced its
passengers with on-board poker machines.
Reach Cairns, in tropical Queensland, and you
could climb instead on to one of the most memorable
trains I have used. The Savannahlander is a little two-
car diesel unit in shiny 1960s chrome, complete with
an ice-box. It rattles very slowly for two days to a dead
end in the middle of nowhere: Forsayth, a place that
hadn’t seen rain in years when I went. We stayed
overnight in a pub and the train drivers caught snakes
for fun before building a pile of empty beer cans on
the platform.
The joy in this Australian journey, and others like it,
wasn’t the train itself. I’m not much interested in the
technicalities, even whether it is steam or diesel, and I
don’t study signalling systems. The pleasure is in the
places you can be taken to, the views, the glimpses
into people’s homes and lives, the chance to close
your eyes and listen to the sounds of travel, to eat
and drink, to give up a bit of control to a system
which may have been evolving for more than a
century. Car travel as a passenger is dull; flying
is a series of hassles. Rail adventures start as you
clamber aboard.
The gateway to these adventures can be found at St
Pancras, at the Eurostar check-in. For now they will
have to wait. Even my booked compartment this New
Year’s Eve, on another revived overnight service from
Brussels to Vienna, hangs in the balance. If France is
shut to the British, can Belgium be far behind? If I
make it to Vienna, what chance of Italy allowing me in
via the glorious Südbahn, over the Semmering Pass,
on the luxurious daily train to Trieste, another
through service just brought back after decades
of dereliction?
That route over the Alps was the pride of the
Austro-Hungarian empire, a multilingual, multi-ethnic
web of territories tied together by railways. “The
second-class carriages, provided with spring seats, are
sometimes nearly as good as those of the first class in
England,” says my 1905 Baedeker guide to this lost,
splendid land, adding that “the speed seldom
exceeds 25 miles per hour... accidents are happily
rare”.
Nostalgia and railways go hand in hand. We
like to think trains were always better in the
past. I can just remember my weekly trip to
Matlock in the last days of British Rail
when you could still get lunch in a dining
car to Derby.
Midland trains
pioneered on-board
dining in Britain: in
the 1870s a
steward took
drinks orders on
departure and threw the list
out of the window at Hendon for the signalman
to telegraph ahead to Bedford. When the train arrived,
the filled glasses were waiting. Today’s trains are more
frequent, faster and more reliable, but the cheerfulr
Let’s dream of
the great rail
adventures we’ll
have next year
Fine dining on the Rovos
train between Pretoria
and Cape Town; below,
room service on the
Trans-Siberian Express;
right, modern comforts on
the Ghan, which does the
1,850-mile trip between
Darwin and Adelaide,
across Australia from
north to south