Who takes the train any more, when air travel is so quick and cheap? Well, environmentalists, aviophobes and InterRailers, among others. A new series explores Europe by rail, starting with a trip from Paris to Berlin
YOU’D THINK THE PARIS-BERLIN train would feel more like a vestige of distant glories, an ageing master squaring up to its own decline. After all, who travels this way any more? Who chooses to pay €130 to fold themselves on to the narrow shelf of a six-berth couchette that an astronaut would find intimate, rattling and rocking and shunting for 800km before being coughed up on to the platform at Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof 10 hours after the plane would have landed?
A midsummer Thursday evening at Gare de l’Est, in Paris. The classic hanging Brillié clock in the rafters swings past 8pm, the signal for platform 3 lights up in red, and you see why you have it all wrong. From all corners of the concourse, people press towards the red-and-white carriages of the Perseus train, the daily sleeper service connecting the French and German capitals.
Among them are harried, sharp-suited businessmen, families and pensioners, students, cyclists and a smattering of the great unwashed of global train travel: backpackers. Some passengers board with no more than a plastic bag; others look like they’re fleeing with the fruits of a lifetime’s hoarding.
“I’ll tell you where I’m going, but I can’t tell you why I’m going there,” says Alex, a fellow traveller in carriage 97, looking out of the window as the conductors usher the stragglers in. He’s gym-built, shaven-headed, with a silver goatee and a thick southern-French accent. “It’s easier this way.”
Sharing the couchette with Alex and I are four others. There’s a young man who climbs straight on to one of the top bunks, lies down and doesn’t say a word for the rest of the journey, and there’s 30-year-old Marina, a softly spoken Bosnian Serb who fled the war in the 1990s, and her two young boys. They’re visiting her family near Berlin.
The children have never been on a plane, and she worried that it might frighten them. “It’s not ideal with the kids, but hopefully it will be okay,” she says a little anxiously.
The corridor is abuzz with action, passengers hauling their luggage up and down, their languages melding into an indistinct hum. Outside, the whistle blows, the platform clears, and the Perseus eases its way out of the station. The northeastern suburbs of Paris begin to streak by. Pantin. Noisy Le Sec. Le Raincy. Romainville. The train gathers speed, and before long the flat expanses of Champagne and the industrial hinterlands of Lorraine are opening out on both sides. We rattle on, and night draws in.
You don’t need to be an avid traveller, an engine-spotter, a pickpocket or a nostalgia junkie to feel the irresistible pull of a long train journey. A pulse should do it. I know nothing about trains. The rational part of my brain is a well-stocked repository of the worst European rail journeys I’ve ever done. (The overnights between Budapest and Bucharest, and the Disorient Express that links Belgrade and Sofia, both promise grade-A misery.)
But they’re easily suppressed by memories of the most exhilarating ones. The month I spent tearing across the Continent with some friends after finishing school. The solo trip across Siberia the winter after I left college. The slow trains through the Alps, the sleeper from Paris to Milan, the countless French provincial routes. The platforms I’ve slept on, the places I’ve got lost, the strangers I’ve met.
Paris-Moscow, the 120-year-old European classic that I am undertaking, is one of those routes that grow more alluring the more pointless they become. It would be cheaper, quicker and more comfortable to take a plane. But the idea of following the tracks through central and eastern Europe, slicing the Czech Republic, Poland and Belarus and snaking through the forests of western Russia before finally pulling into Belorussky station, in Moscow, a week later has an irresistible sound to it. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by the prospect of returning to France on the longest direct train route left in Europe, a new 52-hour service from Moscow to Nice?
THE WHOLE BUSINESS of modern long-distance European trains is underpinned by this sort of paradox. Cheap air travel has shrunk their market and threatens to make the sleeper train seem quaint and eccentric, a refuge for rail nuts, InterRailers and oddballs.
But the airlines’ success and the cluttering of the skies have also rebounded to the railways’ advantage. Security measures can make flying a degrading, morale-sapping experience. Carbon-spewing planes pose an ethical dilemma. And budget airlines’ predilection for remote rural airports reminds people of the value of a direct city-to-city rail link.
“The only problem is theft,” says Alex as we settle in. “They come by in the middle of the night, slide the door open and slip their hand into your bag, like this.”
Alex goes on to demonstrate in some detail the latest in-train robbery techniques, and I make a mental note to keep an eye on him.
As it happens, Alex commits an offence much worse than stealing my camera. He snores all the way to Hanover. Marina doesn’t sleep for a minute, and, as the train trundles across the darkness of the Rhine Valley and the boys drift off to sleep, she explains how she ended up in Paris 13 years ago after marrying a man who lived there. She still calls her country Yugoslavia.
“I was young when the war happened, and I’ve never returned. Maybe one day my parents will go back, but I was nine years old, I think. I don’t know the place at all.”
Is she sad that she knows so little about where she’s from, I ask. “What’s sad is that we’re all separated. Before the war, we were all together. Now we’re all over the place: France, Germany, America. My aunts are in America, and it’s so far away. We can only see each other every five or 10 years.” Marina doesn’t even try to sleep; she just looks out of the window, waiting for morning.
As I discover over the next week, two groups of nonflyers are always well represented on a European sleeper train: those who can’t (the afraid-of-flying) and those who won’t (committed environmentalists). One Frenchwoman on the Perseus tries to recruit me to her ecoassociation, whose membership seems to consist of her and a friend.
A Parisian couple, Eric Monseigny and Lara Saarbach, are on their way to a wedding near Berlin. I find them sitting in a glamorous spot on the floor outside the toilet whose door won’t close at the end of the carriage. “We like trains, and we think air travel’s time has passed,” says Eric. But isn’t flying often cheaper? “Yes, and that bothers me. I have trouble accepting the logic of that.”
Lara’s mother is Irish, London-born, it turns out, and she feels herself “a little bit Irish” too. She talks fondly about their holidays in the west of Ireland, the sailing they’ve done off the Kerry coast and the train trip she once took from Paris to Beijing. She’d choose the train every time.
TO AN IRISHMAN or a Belgian, any train journey over five hours is enough to evoke Zhivago’s trip to the Urals. Yu Kong, a 26-year-old Chinese student who has just finished a three-year engineering course in Angers, is harder to impress. When he travels home to his parents from Shanghai, it takes 37 hours by train. His girlfriend, Liang Yu, has also just finished her degree in France, and they’re getting ready to return home to China after a short holiday in Germany.
“We took the decision to return together,” says Yu. “It’s been three years, and in China we’re only children, so it’s hard for our parents.”
With all those hours to fill, and knowing that you’ll never see your fellow passengers again, long train journeys often lend themselves to an easy candour. Liang, a 23-year-old who studied finance in France, is comparing notes outside the cabin with Eric Bute from Hong Kong, another student. Leaving Europe will be difficult, she says, but it has given her an eye-opening perspective on things back home.
“You get to compare,” she says. “You can sense all the controls and restrictions in China . . . Young people from China are travelling all over the world now. They know how things are. But then they have to face the question: do I return or not?
“I thought of staying, but all my family, friends and relatives are there. Two or three of my friends are staying in France – they got jobs – and I have a friend who married a French guy.”
Together, they laugh at the recollection of the differences that struck them at the beginning. How European students’ idea of socialising started and ended with drink, instead of playing games and going shopping, like they would at home. They talk about whether China will open up, about the tensions they feel and the inklings of change.
“With the internet, it’s not easy for the government to keep things secret,” Liang says. “It’s impossible to control it. I think people know China’s problems. But it’s our country. People have to be patient.”
She sounds curious about everything, throwing out a question with every reply. “I heard Ireland has the longest history in Europe. Is that true? And I know Enya, of course. She’s a symbol of Ireland.”
Liang has never been, but it’s on the list. “My father loves travelling. He hasn’t been abroad, but he has travelled all over China. So he told me, when I left, to make the most of it. He told me to travel as much as I could.”
In the corridor, an elderly American couple, Jim Lynn and Marilyn Ferguson from Florida, are trying to balance some coffee cups as they move between swaying carriages. They spent a month on holiday in Paris, Jim explains, and they’ve booked an apartment in Berlin for another four weeks.
“This was convenient for our trip. We knew how to get to the train station, and we’d be saving a day by sleeping on the train.” “And we were curious,” he adds with a grin. “It’s pretty interesting. There are five of us in a little cabin: us, two Korean girls and another guy.” (I’d seen the Korean girls. They’d been running up and down the train for hours, giggling at everything they saw.)
“We were a little apprehensive about sharing,” says Marilyn. She still looks a little apprehensive about it. But they’re right: a sleeper train is pretty interesting. Falling asleep to the click-clack of wheels drumming away under the floor. The constant forward movement. The small dramas of the moving bedroom heightened by the passing landscape: a barren moonscape, a sudden mountain, the melancholy sight of a night-time smoker on an empty platform. “It’s like a fantasy, looking out at the view changing all the time,” says Eric Bute.
It’s already morning, and as soon as we begin creeping up on the German capital’s lesser-seen suburbs, the quiet corridor springs into life again. Just before 10am, the Perseus screeches to a stop and opens its doors with a great hydraulic sigh. Carriage 97 disgorges its bedraggled masses on to the platform, and they fan out into the city.