Night Trains

by Martin, Andrew;

  Parc Montsouris contains a sunken green glade about 500 metres long, concealed behind trees and blocked off by two fences and a couple of warning signs. A rotting railway line emerges from a tunnel at one end and runs into another tunnel at the other end. The sleepers are green with lichen, and the whole thing is asleep. The sides of the cutting are formed by arcaded walls about twenty feet high.

  The northerly park, Buttes Chaumont, is accessible from the Métro station of that name. Here, the corresponding cutting of the Ceinture is even more haunting. I know because a couple of weeks before my Blue Train excursion I had gone in search of it. I began by asking after it in the park’s café, Café Rosa Bonheur, an oriental-looking pavilion that is itself well hidden behind chestnut trees. It is apparently a meeting place for Parisian lesbians, but a young man stood behind the bar. I asked, in my appalling French, if he knew the location of ‘the old railway’. He shook his head, completely baffled. It turned out that the cutting I sought was only twenty seconds away from the café, albeit sunk in the middle of a small wood. It made a dreamy spectacle, with curtains of ivy over the tunnel mouths at either end.

  The cutting forms a gloomy complement to a park with macabre overtones, a warped arcadia with its mock Roman temple on top of an artificial cliff. There’s a grotto beneath – blasted by explosives out of the remains of a gypsum quarry – through which an artificial waterfall tumbles into an artificial lake. A concrete bridge twenty metres above the lake is known as ‘suicide bridge’. It’s fitting that this creepy place was the meeting place of the Charlie Hebdo killers, who’d done their murdering a couple of months before my visit to the park.

  There were no arcaded walls to this cutting and it was shallower that the one in Parc Montsouris. A middle-aged man with a camera around his neck was approaching. He brazenly scrambled down the bank, climbed over the broken fence, and stepped onto the mildewed sleepers of the track. Should I follow him? Here was a challenge to my courage. I was reminded of the time I first visited New York, in the late 1980s. My guidebook had warned me it was highly dangerous to use the Subway after eight o’clock in the evening, but the first thing I saw, when stepping off the airport bus in downtown Manhattan at half past eight, was a little old lady descending into a Subway station. So I followed the camera man. I tried to ask, in French, ‘Is it OK to walk on the tracks?’ He actually did give a Gallic shrug before replying in English: ‘This is France. You can do what you want.’ ‘But is it illegal?’ I persisted, wimpishly. Another shrug: ‘A lot of things are illegal.’

  Going by the amount of graffiti on the retaining walls, many people clearly had walked on the tracks. Some was in English, probably post-dating the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which had made this arrondissement notorious: ‘I still love my ghetto.’ The tunnel was blocked off at the west end, so I scrambled back up to street level, following the route of the old line a little way. After it disappeared under the McDonald’s on Rue Manin, I found it again on a blackened viaduct. At intervals there were armed soldiers, who looked as though they were guarding the Ceinture, but they were part of the anti-terrorist force, L’Opération Sentinelle. They had more serious crimes on their minds than trespassing on the Petite Ceinture, whose surviving infrastructure – mostly above ground in spite of those tunnels in the parks – is known to attract Parisian cataphiles or troglodytes, a place of timeslip and landslip. Old sleeper carriages have been parked on the line and used as a homeless hostel. It is also celebrated as a pathway for foxes.

  To see the line’s point of access to the Gare de Lyon, you have to travel about three miles south. Parallel to the traffic jams of the Boulevard Poniatowski, in the 12th arrondissement, are more rotting tracks of the Ceinture. They are at right angles to the great, grey mouth of Gare de Lyon, which lies below. On the south side of the railway gorge that accommodates Gare de Lyon are the remains of the Ceinture station called Gare de La Rapée-Bercy, which closed in 1934, though part of the platform remains. The quickest way to walk from Boulevard Poniatowski to Gare de Lyon itself is to go along Rue de Charenton, which runs parallel to the main line along the north side of the gorge. On Rue de Charenton stands a model railway shop called Le Petit Train Bleu. There is a small layout in the window. A notice reads ‘Pour faire démarrer le train, passé la main’, and if you do so, you block a beam of light, thereby starting the little train. I would have cause to remember that, towards the end of my Blue Train day.

  RUSH HOUR

  While Gare de Lyon never had as many workaday commuter trains as Nord and St Lazare (which was estimated to be the busiest station in the world in 1900), it had a rush hour of the blue trains. Between seven and nine-thirty, the Simplon Orient Express, the Rome Express and the Blue Train itself would take their leave, in theatrical style.

  Let’s look at the Blue Train in the early 1960s. An elderly electric loco would bring the bulk of it to its departure platform from the carriage sidings at nearby Conflans. At the same time, the carriage that had been brought around the Ceinture from the Gare du Nord would be dragged into the station by a giant, wheezing tank engine: a chain-smoking elderly retainer possessing a kind of reverse glamour for being steam-powered in what was by then an electrified station. The sleeper from Nord, which had been at the back of the Flèche d’Or, was now shunted to the front of the Blue Train, while similar manoeuvrings were creating the Rome Express and the Simplon Orient.

  The well-heeled passengers now faced a dilemma. Should they have an aperitif in the Blue Train buffet, or wait until the departure of the Blue Train train. Or both? Perhaps dinner itself ought to be taken before departure? In previous decades, they might have bought a ‘dinner basket’, so they could have a picnic on the train, as Ada Mason does in The Mystery of the Blue Train. There would have been time for all these things. To allow for the vagaries of the English Channel, about an hour’s latitude was built in between the bringing of the ex-Calais sleepers from the Ceinture and departure of the fully assembled Blue Train (which took place at 20.10 in January 1962). So there would have been meditative, or excited, pacing along the platforms, drawn-out goodbyes and train-watching. Those on the Blue Train might have been looking at the departing commuters (whose trains at the time were green) with a feeling of ‘There but for the grace of God …’ The more particularly gluttonous ones might have been watching the supplies being brought to the restaurant cars. In his book Grand European Expresses, George Behrend (1922–2010) described the scene in the early 1960s:

  The Gare de Lyons is at this time a hive of Wagons-Lits activity, alive with blue battery-electric trucks, known in French by the more resounding title of chariots. The charioteers weave their way through the passengers at high speed, bringing the victuals to the various dining cars. They are a band of sinister looking men, yet an essential part of the Company’s service. They seem to have a ferocious enthusiasm for their job. The chef can rely on the charioteers to deliver his blocks of ice, his vegetables and his other comestibles without fail.

  Incidentally, Behrend was the top British expert on the trains de luxe, and wrote several books about them. ‘An authority on Pullman cars,’ wrote his obituarist in The Scotsman, ‘his was a world of Art Deco furnishings, Lalique glass and waiters walking the length of train announcing, “First call for dinner.”’ He was also an authority on Wagons-Lits, and it is said he knew the numbers of all the sleeping cars off by heart. His short book, The History of Wagons-Lits (1875–1955), more of a pamphlet really, is the nearest thing to a comprehensive English-language history of the company. Behrend was educated at Oxford, and saw much action with the Desert 8th Army in Algiers, Italy and Greece. He was a close friend of Benjamin Britten (whose chauffeur he had once been), and also of Peter Pears, W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, and if that all seems to point a certain way, let me cloud the issue by saying that he died at Number 8, Station Road, Findochty, where he’d moved for the sake of his wife’s health.

  GARE D’AUSTERLITZ

  It was easy, amid the happy bustle of the Gare
de Lyon in 2015, to imagine the corresponding scene of fifty years before, but it is time to admit that I was in the station, not because the Blue Train goes from there, but because it used to go from there. Since 2001, the Blue Train – or the ghostly remnant of it – has left from Gare d’Austerlitz, on the other side of the Seine. So I picked up my bag, and quit the Gare de Lyon. Turning back as I walked away, it looked magnificent, like a great Spanish castle in the blue-green light of dusk.

  I reached the river bank. To the right was the Viaduc d’Austerlitz, which carries Line 10 of the Métro. The bridge is single-span, and highly elegant. A train came barrelling up from its tunnel, swept around the fortress-like Institut Médico-Légal (the Paris Morgue) and onto the bridge, firing itself straight into the forehead of the Gare d’Austerlitz. Yes, the Métro station of Gare d’Austerlitz is located in the roof of the main line station, so you have to walk upstairs from the Grandes Lignes to reach the supposed underground railway. This section of line is called ‘the toboggan’, and it seems wrong that a Métro train should be having such fun in the vicinity of the morgue.

  A pedestrian heading for Gare d’Austerlitz from the Right Bank must cross the Seine by the Pont d’Austerlitz, as opposed to the viaduct. The station – terminus of the old Paris-Orléans company – dates from 1862. It is solidly neoclassical, and was comprehensively upstaged when the exotic, Moorish Gare de Lyon was built on the opposite bank in 1900. According to Richards and Mackenzie, in The Railway Station: A Social History, Austerlitz is notable (along with Paddington, King’s Cross and the first Gare Montparnasse) as one of the early ‘twin-sided stations, where arrival and departure took place on opposite sides’. Since that method of operation was abandoned early in the twentieth century, this is a fairly slender claim to fame, and Richards and Mackenzie devote more space to Austerlitz’s sister station, Gare d’Orsay, two miles along the left bank of the river.

  Like Gare de Lyon, Orsay opened in 1900 to coincide with the Paris Exposition. It is in the beaux arts style, like its direct descendant, Grand Central in New York. The painter Édouard Detaille wrote that ‘the station is superb and looks like an art gallery’, and that’s what it became in 1986, after standing idle, a giant haunted house right in the middle of Paris, for forty years. The building features in Nairn’s Paris, which was written in the mid-1960s when its fate was in the balance. (Corbusier was doing some ominous doodlings, being minded to replace it with one of his monoliths.) ‘And this is magnificent,’ writes Nairn, ‘a great curved shell with the scale of St Pancras – filled now with railway junk, parked cars and a few wee lines that peter off miserably to the banlieue from a lower level. See it while you can.’

  But for all its grandeur, Orsay was really just an annexe of Austerlitz. You could say it was to Austerlitz what Cannon Street in London is to Charing Cross. When the South Eastern Railway wanted a more central station than Charing Cross, they built Cannon Street; when the Paris-Orléans company wanted a more central foothold than Austerlitz, they built Orsay.

  Many people who visit what is today the Musée d’Orsay know it used to be a railway station. The PO initials are carved on to the façade, along with the destinations – in Brittany and the Loire – that duplicate those on the front of Austerlitz; plus there is a giant clock inside, which seems to harry the picturegazers on the floor below. But I wonder how many people who have made these deductions go on to ask themselves: how did the trains get in? Perhaps the question comes up after they’ve walked around the outside of the museum, noting that it is bounded to the north by the river, and by buildings older than itself on all other sides. Anyone who saw the children’s film Hugo, by Martin Scorsese, would have been thrown off the trail. The station in that movie resembles Gare d’Orsay, but is served by steam engines, whereas the Gare d’Orsay was the first ever terminus for electric trains. They came in underground from Austerlitz (where the steam locos were taken off and electric ones put on). The tunnel that was used now accommodates part of the subterranean express line called RER C, and is showing its age. It leaks, and must be closed for a few weeks every summer for maintenance.

  In his novel of 1925, Les salles d’attente, Franc-Nohain described Gare d’Austerlitz as ‘adultery’s birthplace’: ‘Like you, monsieur, one comes to wait at Austerlitz for the person who got on the train and who has said their tearful farewells five minutes earlier at Gare d’Orsay. And they continue their journey together from the Gare de Lyon which is very close.’ (In fact, then, any of those three stations could have been ‘adultery’s birthplace’.)

  The main entrance to Gare d’Austerlitz is through the cavernous, largely empty space of a booking hall too big for modern purposes. Here, the old, typically poetic French designation of a ticket hall, La Salle des Pas Perdus (‘the room of lost footsteps’) makes sense. In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the phrase is used in connection with Antwerp Railway Station, one of several depicted in the book, including Gare d’Austerlitz itself. Austerlitz is the name of the central character, which is implausible, although Fred Astaire began life as Frederick Austerlitz. As a child, the Austerlitz in Sebald’s book had been a refugee on a Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia. It is possible he was given the name Austerlitz having passed through the station at some point. This is a strange, inert novel about one neurotic and very long-winded man’s search for identity. There are no paragraphs, and the incredibly long sentences are punctuated by the phrase, ‘said Austerlitz’, which rings like a death knell. (Sometimes this gives way to ‘Austerlitz continued’, and he certainly does continue.) Here is part of his account of the station:

  That station, said Austerlitz, has always seemed to me the most mysterious of all the railway terminals of Paris. I spent many hours in it during my student days, and even wrote a kind of memorandum on its layout and history. At the time I was particularly fascinated by the way the Métro trains coming from the Bastille, having crossed the Seine, roll over the iron viaduct into the station’s upper storey, quite as if the façade were swallowing them up.

  He continues about how he felt an ‘uneasiness’ in the hall behind this façade, which was ‘filled with a feeble light and almost entirely empty’.

  The information office – a modest, modern affair – is on the concourse, and here a TV screen advertised the 21.22 to Toulon, Les Arcs-Draguignan, Fréjus-St-Raphaël, St-Raphaël-Valescure, Cannes, Antibes, Nice-Ville. This is the heir of the old Blue Train, which for most of its life terminated beyond Nice, at Ventimiglia or San Remo, after its exquisite dawdle along the Riviera. The 21.22 does have a name, but not all to itself. It must share it with a dozen other sleeper trains operating entirely within France and run by SNCF: the Intercités de Nuit, most of which will have been abolished by the time this book appears. At the time of writing, the night train to Nice is scheduled to run for the last time in October 2017.

  Most of the surviving sleepers from Paris now start at Austerlitz. It could be said that an outmoded type of train has been concentrated on an outmoded station. In recent years Austerlitz has lost its long-distance intercity services to the TGV Atlantiques, operating from Gare Montparnasse. In 2013, the TGV service from Gare de Lyon made redundant the Trenhotel night train from Austerlitz to Madrid and Barcelona. But Austerlitz is being refurbished, so it will have a bright future eventually, and will be awarded some of its own TGVs. An artist’s impression of the new look is shown on posters dotted around the concourse, with the slogan, ‘Découvrez Votre Nouvelle Gare, Austerlitz 2020.’

  Meanwhile the place was sunk in a Sundayish mood. The lights hanging from the roof of the train shed seemed underpowered. On the concourse, I kept noticing the wrong things: two pigeons having a fight; isolated, garish vending machines; temporary yellow plastic barriers. Austerlitz has a station piano, and one of the few other passengers was playing something mournful and bluesy. Instead of repairing to the Train Bleu brasserie of Gare de Lyon, I bought something called a ‘Formule 9.20 Euros’ from a snack bar on the Austerlitz concourse: a ham
salad baguette, a piece of madeleine and a small can of Heineken. Every so often an SNCF official went past. They were kitted out as though by a chic film director, in bright red jackets and retro white peaked caps, and rode expertly on those two-wheeled scooters called Segways. They might still be operating sleeper trains, but they’ve left walking behind.

  Ought I to enquire about the 21.22? In the buffet of the Eurostar that morning, I’d bumped into a man I knew slightly from York, my native city. On hearing that I would be boarding a sleeper to the South of France, he said, ‘First class, I hope? Otherwise you’ll be sharing a compartment. Wouldn’t fancy that myself.’ He had zoned in on my own anxiety. I had a first class ticket – which meant, in the case of the 21.22, a ticket for a four-berth rather than a six-berth couchette – but it was a press ticket, and I didn’t know whether it gave exclusive occupation of the compartment (‘espace privatif’) which can be guaranteed by the payment of sufficient money. I said something of the sort, and my acquaintance responded, ‘The French air traffic controllers are on strike today, you know. All those people on the ground who should be up in the air? That’s why this train is so crowded. I think your sleeper will be as well.’

  The 21.22 was in the station, seemingly rather marginalised on Platform 20, the southernmost one. It was partly blue, but also partly white, with outbreaks of red, all part of a mongrel assemblage of 1980s carriages. The best colour scheme was that of the electric locomotive: orange and cement grey. At 8.45 both train and platform were empty and unattended. How to kill the time until departure? The one facility Gare d’Austerlitz has that Gare de Lyon lacks is a shower. It is located in Les Toilettes. (Gare de Lyon did have baths in 1931, according to The Railway Magazine: they were adjacent to hairdressing and shoe-cleaning salons.) Modern sleeper trains usually include showers, but on the Wagons-Lits services, a full body wash at the compartment sink was the only option, except in the case of the Rome Express and the Simplon Orient Express, whose fourgons, or baggage wagons, included ‘bath compartments’ which were actually showers with enamel floors, warm towel rails and wash basins. There would certainly be nothing of the kind on the 21.22, so I approached Les Toilettes.