Night Trains

by Martin, Andrew;

  ACCUEIL

  The toilettes in Gare d’Austerlitz feature a kind of reception at which a woman awaits. She admits you through a barrier either on the male or the female side, and you pay according to whether you want the loo or the shower and the loo. The woman spoke English, but with a patchy vocabulary.

  ‘I’d like a shower,’ I said.

  She looked at me warily. ‘We don’t ’ave any …’

  ‘Towels?’ I suggested.

  She nodded. ‘Towels, yes. And the water is …’

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘It is not very ’ot.’

  The shower was clean, and lukewarm. I dried myself with a spare pair of boxer shorts, which I then threw away, because they would make everything else in my bag soaking wet. (I had neglected to bring a towel, probably because, fifty years ago, the Wagons-Lits company had provided them in all its sleeper compartments.) I was now fit to share a sleeping compartment with strangers, should that be necessary. Those emerging from the showers at Austerlitz have the option of two buttons to press: a scowl or a smile alongside the question, ‘Êtes-vous satisfait du relais toilettes?’ I pressed the smile, because what the hell? The action reminded me that in France you always have to validate your billet before boarding a train. This is a matter of sticking the ticket into a machine, which stamps it with the date. I walked over to the validating machine on Platform 20 and stamped my ticket. (I once asked a platform guard at Gare de Lyon if it mattered which end you stamped, and he was staggered at the question: it did not matter.)

  To think that in only just over twelve hours, I would be in the South of France! The Riviera! And I’m afraid the real Riviera is in France, and not anywhere accessible from Paddington Station in London, as the Great Western Railway tried to make people believe when, in 1904 – as part of the ‘See Your Own Country First’ movement that had also given rise to Travel magazine – it christened its fastest train to Cornwall the Riviera Express. (The proof of the GWR’s failure to transfer any of the Riviera magic to Cornwall lies in the fact that Agatha Christie glamorised her early short story The Mystery of the Plymouth Express by turning it into The Mystery of the Blue Train, rather than other way around.)

  At ten to nine, Platform 20 still looked very quiet, which perhaps ought to be expected. The Intercités de Nuits, I had once read, take up 25 per cent of the budget of the French intercity trains, and carry 3 per cent of the passengers. But now an SNCF man and woman stood at a makeshift stall, on which was written the word ‘Accueil’. That means ‘Welcome’, a word of which I am deeply suspicious, but the pair were smiling broadly as I approached, ticket in hand.

  The man took the ticket, and examined it thoughtfully; he passed it to the woman, and they exchanged looks, as if to say, ‘Who’s going to deal with him, you or me?’ It was the man who drew the short straw. ‘Your train,’ he said, ‘has been deleted.’

  ‘Eh?’ I said, with great savoir-faire. ‘But it’s standing there.’ And I pointed at the 21.22, all ten carriages of it.

  ‘But there has been a strike,’ offered the woman.

  ‘The air traffic control strike, you mean?’

  They must have thought this a strange question, but I was wondering whether the train drivers had come out in sympathy with the aviation unions.

  ‘It is a railway strike,’ the male half of the pair explained.

  ‘Is that why it’s so quiet here?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘It is quiet,’ said the man, ‘because it is late.’

  ‘It is late and there’s a strike,’ put in the woman, obviously the more conciliatory of the two.

  ‘But I’ve been seeing trains leaving Paris all evening,’ I said.

  ‘It is only a little strike,’ said the woman. And it seemed it affected only the sleeper trains, and the drivers who took them from Paris to the various halfway points, where crew changes took place. They were protesting at new working practices.

  ‘Go to the information office,’ said the man, ‘and they will arrange you somewhere to sleep.’

  It was like that moment at the end of a crime novel when the killer is revealed: the clues had been there to see all along: the overall quietness of the station, the almost total lack of activity on Platform 20 and, come to think of it, the details of the 21.22 had been flashing on the departure monitors. There had also been a longish word flashing underneath that I couldn’t understand. As I walked towards the ticket office, I looked up at one of the monitors, and the word was still there: ‘Supprimé’, which means, I have since discovered, ‘cancelled’.

  The entrance to the information office was momentarily blocked by male and female SNCF officials kissing each other on the cheeks – apparently a nightly ritual to do with a shift change. The French railways were living up to the way they are caricatured by their British detractors, who elide them with their own wrong idea of old British Rail: complacent, over-subsidised and strike-prone. Certainly they are strike-prone. If only I could move my hand across the beam of light and start the Blue Train, as instructed in the toy shop.

  In the information office, I announced myself to the clerk as one of those marooned by the cancellation of the 21.22.

  ‘You can still go to the 21.22,’ he said. ‘It is a sleeper; you can sleep on it.’

  ‘But it won’t be going anywhere?’

  He conceded that it would not.

  So I returned to Platform 20, and ‘Accueil’.

  ‘I’ve been told I can sleep on this train,’ I said.

  The man looked at the woman; they exchanged slow nods. The woman reached down behind the panel reading ‘Accueil’, producing a small cardboard box, which she handed to me. Before I departed, the man asked, ‘Do you want a ticket to Nice on the TGV? It leaves from Gare de Lyon,’ he added, gesturing towards the river, ‘at 07.02 tomorrow.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to Nice by day.’

  This aroused suspicion, and triggered a discussion between the two.

  The train consisted of ordinary seating, second-class couchettes (six berths) and two carriages of first-class couchettes (four berths). The only people on board – about half a dozen – were in the same first-class carriage I’d been booked into. It couldn’t be that all the people dim enough not to have learnt about the cancellation had booked into the same carriage. It must be that all those reduced to spending the night on the train had been given a first-class couchette in compensation for ‘the inconvenience caused’.

  The train manager, who was evidently not on strike (but did not speak any English), showed me into my quarters with a bashful smile. Here was a pretty good simulacrum of a prison cell: grey walls, thin purple mattress, a steel ladder to reach the top bunks. (The Y-class Wagons-Lits berths of the late 1930s were the first to have aluminium ladders – rather than wood – but the rungs were carpeted, in honour of people’s bare feet.)

  As I closed the door, I hoped at least that no one else would come knocking, that I would continue to have the compartment to myself. In a first-class W-L sleeper there was no danger of having to share. In second class you might have to share, which you could avoid by bribing the conductor. You did this by tipping him in advance, rather than at the end of the journey, and as you pressed the money into his hand, you’d say you were hoping for a good night’s sleep. That would probably do the trick, if he liked you.

  In Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot finds the train to be almost full up when he boards it at Stamboul to go to Belgrade (where he will be accommodated in the coach from Athens, which will take him through to Calais). The Wagons-Lits conductor explains, ‘All the world elects to travel tonight!’ He is under pressure to find space for Poirot, however, because Poirot is an old friend of a Monsieur Bouc (‘a Belgian, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits’), whom he has just bumped into in the Tokatlıyan Hotel in Stamboul. There is one possibility: a Mr Harris has failed to take his place in a second-class (i.e. shared) compartment. Poirot is shown into the compar
tment, whose sole occupant, a Mr MacQueen, looks disappointed at this development. The W-L conductor explains to MacQueen, ‘There is no other berth on the train, Monsieur. The gentleman has to come in here …’ Poirot notices the apology in his tone with amusement: ‘Doubtless the man had been promised a good tip if he could keep the compartment for use of the other traveller.’ (Poirot, incidentally, had been confident that Harris would be a no-show, and this was because he knew his Dickens. In Martin Chuzzlewit, a Mrs Harris is the imaginary friend of Mrs Gamp.)

  I glanced at my watch – 21.40 – and then the penny dropped. Nobody would come knocking because this train had now officially (even if not in practice) departed. I could lock the door! There were two locks, and a worrying sign: ‘For your peace of mind use both closures.’ I now had two presents to unwrap: the box I’d been given at ‘Accueil’, and the sleeper pack that lay on my bunk – which turned out to contain a tissue, a wet wipe, spongy earplugs and beige travel socks. I was about to open the other box when there came a sharp knocking at the door. It was an elderly and agitated man, possibly French. He was speaking in urgent tones about ‘Les toilettes’. He took me along the corridor to the WC. He rattled the handle, in order to prove that it wouldn’t open; he pointed to the red indicator that showed it was locked, but he gave me to understand that it was not occupied, and that it was the same with every other toilet on the train. The old man’s gestures made plain that he’d looked in vain for the chef du train, so I stepped down onto the platform and returned to ‘Accueil’, where the SNCF couple were packing up to leave. After saying ‘Bonsoir’ (I had remembered that it was generally best to start with a formal greeting in France, however aggressive you intend to be), I launched in: ‘Do you realise that all the toilets on the train are locked?’

  The couple looked at each other: who should field this latest outburst? Again, it was the man who took the lead.

  ‘Yes, they are locked,’ he said, ‘but that is completely normal for when the train is in the station; otherwise the stuff goes on the tracks.’

  ‘But normally,’ I said, ‘the train leaves the station.’

  He nodded, accepting the contention. ‘You can use the toilets over there.’ He pointed to the shower block.

  ‘And you don’t have to pay,’ added the woman.

  I relayed the news to the old man, before deciding I’d better use the facilities myself. I was recognised immediately by the woman in the toilettes, who did not seem very surprised to see me again. Returning to my compartment, I opened the ‘Accueil’ box, which was marked ‘SNCF Assistance’, and subtitled ‘Falières – Nutrition’. It was a sort of Red Cross parcel, to be handed out in case of a strike. There were four biscuits (‘Lait choco’) and a yoghurt with a poetic name (‘Arlequin de fruits’). There was also a plastic mug containing drinking chocolate that was potentially hot chocolate. There was a canister at the bottom containing calcium oxide. If you shook this and waited three minutes it would heat the contents. I followed the instructions as best as I could, and after three minutes I drank a cup of … cold hot chocolate.

  Now for the bedding, because I would be making my own bed, unlike in W-L days. (Those boarding the Blue Train at Gare de Lyon would find the beds ready made up. Those who had come around on the Ceinture would be invited to step out onto the platform at Gare de Lyon while the job was done.) There was a decent-sized pillow and a sleeping bag of the same indeterminate colour as the travel socks. Both were sealed in plastic wrappers. When I ran my hand over the sleeping bag in the dim compartment, static electricity caused small sparks to fly up. I prepared one of the lower bunks. As I closed the blind, I looked across Platform 20 and saw a man on the second floor of a temporary station office belonging to the contractors refurbishing Gare d’Austerlitz. He stood before the window, stretching and yawning at the end of a long day’s work. I lowered the blind, set my alarm for six, and read some of Nairn’s Paris. Another ‘passenger’ (possibly the old man) was coughing in his compartment. After a while, he stopped, and I drifted off to sleep.

  I was woken up by somebody else’s alarm (possibly the old man’s) at half past five. I sat up, fantasising that perhaps all the trouble with the unions had been rectified by a late-night negotiation, and I had been whisked to the Riviera after all. But when I opened the blind, Platform 20 was still there, looking just as dark as it had at 10pm, and there was a man in the office across the way, possibly the same one as the night before. He did look similar, and he was stretching and yawning just as the man had the night before, but this was more of a must-shake-off-this tiredness-and-get-down-to-some-work kind of yawn.

  Sparrows twittered on a scrubby patch of grey garden next to Platform 20 as I ate the four biscuits from the ‘Assistance’ parcel. I pulled on my trousers and shirt and opened the compartment door. A young couple were in the corridor, finishing the packing of their bags. They seemed highly amused by the whole experience. They said they were from Hong Kong, and touring Europe. Did they know of the French propensity to strike? ‘Yes, we had heard of that!’ said the man. Had they slept well? ‘Yes,’ said the woman, laughing, ‘but I need toilet!’ And they went off. At six o’clock, the chef du train reappeared, walking along the corridor calling ‘Service!’ It was unclear what service he was offering, but he, like his colleague of the night before, enquired if I wanted to go to Nice on the 07.02 TGV from Gare de Lyon. Apparently, he was in a position to give me a ticket there and then. He was pushing the TGV quite hard: ‘Cinq heures!’ he said, as though rubbing in the fact that this train was one of those that are killing off the Blue Train. I was reminded of a remark made to me by one former enthusiast for French railways: ‘I boycott French trains these days. They just want to TGV everything – and the TGVs are good, they continue to run in the strikes. But the classics and locals are a farce.’

  The 07.02 from Gare de Lyon was certainly tempting. I had been on the TGVs to the South of France before. They fulfil the railway fantasy of Adolf Hitler, who dreamt of high-speed double-deckers. It is depressing to think that the niggardly British loading gauge prevents even the operation of double-decker commuter trains, never mind expresses. The seats are so well-padded, the armrests so wide, that the passenger feels resplendent, and if – on a double seat – you lift up the armrest in the middle, you effectively have a sofa. There’s no restaurant car, but you can sit on high stools in the buffet cars, which are like space-age cocktail bars. There is such a palpable surge as the train speeds along the Rhône Valley that you keep thinking it’s going to take off, but for the run along the Riviera, the trains slow down from their top speed of 200mph. The construction of a high-speed line would wreck that precious landscape, and the relative slowness also allows appreciation of the sea views.

  It is also the case that a day train to the Riviera has a Wagons-Lits precedent, in the form of the Côte d’Azur Pullman Express, which coincided with the Blue Train heyday, running between 1929 and 1939. It left Paris at ten to nine in the morning, and arrived at Ventimiglia at midnight. But this book is about night trains, and as I left Gare d’Austerlitz – walking out into drizzling rain at half past seven – it was a case of ‘Au revoir’, not ‘Adieu’.

  RETURN TO THE GARE D’AUSTERLITZ

  Two weeks later, there had been no noticeable progression in the refurbishment. As before, the place was almost empty of passengers. Instead of the backpacker at the station piano, there was a small boy, and since he was experimenting with a single repeated note, the effect was similarly melancholic.

  Yes, the half-blue train awaited at Platform 20, but then it had awaited at Platform 20 before, and it was looking just as neglected as it had done last time. As before, the departure screens showed 21.22, and its list of destinations, but this time the notice was not flashing; the word ‘Supprimé’ was nowhere to be seen. In the absence of any indication to the contrary, it must be assumed that the 21.22 would be leaving the station, but better to make sure. I flagged down one of the white-capped attendants passing by on
his Segway, and asked, ‘Le train pour Nice – c’est d’accord?’ He answered, as the French tend to do when I speak to them, in English, ‘Of course it is, of course.’ Having already eaten dinner, I bought a can of Heineken, then drifted towards the information office. According to a female clerk, the 21.22 is ‘still called the Blue Train by “older” [she made the quotation mark gesture] people, but I’ve never called it that myself’.

  By now, a couple of dozen people with rucksacks and suitcases were flowing towards Platform 20. Alarmingly, another pair of male and female officials had set up a little booth bearing the dreaded word, ‘Accueil’, but they were only checking tickets, and they wished me ‘Bonsoir’ as they pointed me towards the first-class couchettes, where it seemed that quite a lot of people were already in their beds and asleep.

  I located my four-berth compartment. My bunk was one of the two lower ones. There was no one else in the compartment, but a backpack lay on one of the top bunks. Its owner must be the youngish bloke loitering in the doorway while eating a long baguette sandwich. In response to my ‘Bonsoir,’ he nodded vaguely. He then came into the compartment and took another sandwich out of the backpack. He resumed his position in the doorway to eat this one. Did he know that the originator of this train, the Wagons-Lits company, was famous for its five-course cordon bleu dinners? He had now jammed his sandwich between his knees in order to start swigging from a litre bottle of mineral water.