Night Trains

by Martin, Andrew;

  The window blind was about a quarter of the way down. As the whistle blew for departure, I opened it fully and perched on my bunk, glad to see Gare d’Austerlitz finally recede. I fished the can of Heineken out of my rucksack, and spread my railway map over my knees. We began to wriggle through the suburbs of Paris, over suburban lines mainly used by Line D of the RER. We would be crossing the Seine at Melun, about twenty-five miles to the south-east, prior to linking up with the old PLM main line (the one we should have been on all along from the historic-romantic point of view) emanating from Gare de Lyon.

  Today, the PLM line forms the slow – or, as SNCF cleverly call it, the ‘classic’ – line south. It dates from the 1850s. The modern, high-speed route to the South of France was opened in 1981. They both go via Lyons, albeit via different stations, but the classic line bulges out east to Dijon en route. TGV trains are not confined to the TGV lines: they are equipped with two electrification systems, which is why you can catch a TGV train from Paris to Dijon, even though Dijon is not yet on a TGV line. But we would be stopping at neither Dijon nor Lyons. In deference to a good night’s sleep, our first stop would not be until Toulon, at 06.39.

  A well-preserved Frenchman, aged about sixty-five, now entered the compartment. He put a bag on the lower berth and heaved another bag onto the upper one. An elegant woman of similar age was hovering behind him, so it was clearly going to be a full house. She smiled at me, and he said something in French, which I took to be a greeting. I wheeled out my ‘Bonsoir,’ which caused him to say, in English, what he had probably just said in French: ‘We close the blind, OK?’ I did so. The Seine crossing at Melun would have to be taken on trust.

  I picked up my beer for a walk along the corridors. The scenes in the compartments – such as still had their doors open – were reminiscent of footage of soldiers relaxing during downtime in the trenches of the First World War: some people were reading, some slept, while others just sat on their bunks and stared into space. There was no restaurant or bar car, but there was a leaflet on the floor that promised breakfast with a picture of a hot chocolate and a croissant.

  I felt like a street drinker, having nowhere to put my beer down. On the old Blue Train there would have been the Voiture Salon Bar, which was customised from a Pullman day car, and adjoined the Voiture Restaurant. In the bar car, as in the restaurant, the soft pink table lights would have been glowing on the marquetry. One could sit at a table (and you could eat your dinner in the bar car, since it was used as overspill for the restaurant) or on one of the stools by the bar itself. The wine list was extensive; the main attractions of Paris or Nice were listed in pages at the back, and could be quickly found by means of a thumb-index.

  All the most interesting people on the train would have congregated in the bar car. In the 1950s, for example, one might have seen Evelyn Waugh, Charlie Chaplin, Somerset Maugham and our own George Behrend. For teetotallers the train provided the option, from 1960, of two Wagons-Lits Pullmans, which had not been converted, and served their original function of providing a good sit down. In all of these places and along the corridors of the train, the carpet – probably of light blue – would have had a deep pile, so the erratic footfall of passengers returning to their berths late after dinner would not wake those already asleep.

  Sometimes, a space was cleared for dancing to a gramophone in the bar car. In Charles Dickens: A Life, Claire Tomalin relates that Dickens once taught his business associate George Dolby how to dance the can-can on a moving train. That was in the 1860s. In the 1960s, there was a sleeper service from Calais to Innsbruck called the Snow Sing Express. It was aimed at young British skiers, and had un-switch-off-able piped music in all the compartments. There was dancing – all night – to the twist in the bar car. In 1962, ITN made a short film about the train. The presenter was Michael Barsley, who would go on to write a book on the Orient Express. He did a grumpy old man act, professing to find it all very regrettable. Today, there is the Mixery Melt! train, which carries 600 revellers every summer from Cologne to the Melt! Festival of electronic music, which is held at Ferropolis, an open-air museum of vast industrial machines. The train is a sleeper, theoretically. ‘But with decks set up in the club carriage,’ I read in The Guardian, ‘and DJs from Dekmantel Soundsystem on board to run them, this is not rail travel for those who like to doze off while reading a book.’

  Back in the compartment, the sandwich-eater was already fast asleep, like a corpse, on his top bunk. The French couple were making up their beds. The woman was on the top bunk. Remembering that the man spoke English, I said, ‘Are you a regular on this train?’

  He frowned, not understanding. I tried something less colloquial: ‘You know this train?’ But that was clearly too simple, because he replied, with a note of sarcasm, ‘I know this train.’

  I went to the WC. There was a toilet going straight onto the tracks and a sink about as big as a shoe box. There was a single tap; the eau was non-potable. I had a wash, which necessarily involved spraying water everywhere, then tried to pee away every last drop of Heineken from my bladder.

  In the compartment, the French couple were now eating their dinner: she above, he below. Each had a paper plate on which were neatly arranged crackers, cheese, pâté and garnish. Well, it was no worse than sharing a compartment with someone who’d bought a dinner basket at Gare de Lyon. I made up my own bed, then riffled through my bag looking for the paperback I’d brought: My Friend Maigret (1949), by Georges Simenon.

  Inspector Maigret is travelling from Paris to the South of France to investigate a murder. He is accompanied by the earnest Inspector Pyke, who has come from Scotland Yard to study Maigret’s methods, but the trouble is, Maigret has no methods. At about 8pm they arrive at the Gare de Lyon, and Maigret wonders which train to take:

  Alone, he would have been content with a couchette. At the Gare de Lyons he hesitated. Then at the last moment he took two wagon-lit places … It was sumptuous. In the corridor they found de luxe travellers, with impressive-looking luggage. An elegant crowd, laden with flowers, was seeing a film star on to the train.

  ‘It’s the Blue Train,’ Maigret mumbled, as if to excuse himself.

  An hour later, Maigret is sitting fully clothed on his bunk, smoking his pipe. Inspector Pyke, impeccable in dressing gown and pyjamas, asks:

  ‘Do you sleep well on trains?’

  ‘I sleep well anywhere.’

  ‘The train doesn’t help you think?’

  ‘I think so little, you know!’

  The entente cordiale was also under strain in my own compartment. The male half of the French couple was eating a bag of crisps, or ‘chips’ as the French call them, and every so often he’d hand a few of these up to his wife, which was irritating: why didn’t she have her own bag of chips?

  After half an hour of Maigret, I turned off my personal reading light. The Frenchwoman did the same with hers soon after. Now the only light left on was the Frenchman’s. He would presumably be turning his off soon, and we could all try to join the upper-bunk sandwich-eater in the land of nod. But the Frenchman now produced his own book from under his pillow. It was by somebody called Russell Banks (an American whose novels concern ‘detailed accounts of domestic strife and the daily struggles of often marginalised characters’). Judging by the methodical regularity of his page-turning, the Frenchman was lapping up the struggles of the marginal. But at the exact moment I realised I needed to go to the loo again, he briskly locked both locks on the door, and turned out his light.

  So I did not go to the loo. I fantasised instead about ‘espace privatif’ – sole occupancy. That would have been guaranteed in the sleeping accommodation most closely associated with the Blue Train, namely the Lx10-class, introduced in 1928, and the most luxurious that Wagons-Lits ever made. These had the most elaborate marquetry and the widest beds, and the sink was in a wooden bay that was almost like an en-suite bathroom, with a big mirror to one side. Each compartment had only one bed, and there were only ten c
ompartments to a carriage. A couple would – or could, if they were getting along – book two adjacent compartments and open the intervening door. After the Wall Street Crash there were fewer takers for this sort of extravagance, and from 1931, the Lx began to be modified. Extra berths were added to four of the ten compartments so two people might share. In 1942, some of the cars were further modified, so that every compartment could house two people. What had been Lx10s therefore became Lx20s. You could have one of these to yourself, but you’d have to pay twice as much as someone wiling to share.

  Further bathos was in store for the Lx, in that, from the early 1950s, the maple panelling was replaced with Formica, the art deco lights by fluorescent strips. In that same decade the ‘P’ type car – so called because it was designed by M. Louis Pillepich, Engineer-in-Chief of Wagons-Lits – was introduced to the Blue Train alongside the Lx. The ‘P’ type cars were for ‘the atomic age’, and had skins of unpainted ribbed steel. So they were not blue, and there was nowhere to hang the company crest. They were designed for sole – if cramped – occupancy. The larger berths were like an inverted ‘L’. There was standing room in the vertical part of the ‘L’, and a raised bunk was slotted into the horizontal part. But what of the void beneath? That was given over to a cheaper berth, euphemistically designated ‘Special’, wherein you could only stand up immediately inside the door, after which it became coffin-like; this berth would be called a ‘pod’ today. The P’s had plywood panelling, held by aluminium strips. This was all part of the democratisation of the Blue Train, a spur to which had come in 1945, when the beginning of a regular air service between Paris and Nice took away many of the wealthier clients. Another milestone, or gravestone, was reached in the early 1980s, when SNCF couchettes began to replace the sleeper carriages, a demotion reflecting the fact that the daytime TGVs were reducing the journey time from Paris to Nice from twenty hours to five.

  At what turned out to be about 2am I was woken up (therefore I must have gone to sleep) by the very proximate barking of a dog. But that couldn’t be right, since the train was still moving; we couldn’t be near any dog on any station platform. Surely it was a mishearing or a dream. (In 1864, Gustave Flaubert wrote to a friend, ‘I get so bored on the train that I am about to howl with tedium after five minutes of it. One might think it’s a dog someone has forgotten in the compartment; not at all, it is M. Flaubert, groaning.’ In spite, or perhaps because of, the boredom, he could not sleep on night trains unless he stayed up throughout the previous night.)

  Just over an hour later, the train had stopped moving, and was being bashed about by a heavy shunting manoeuvre. We had reached Valence Ville, not to be confused with Valence TGV, which exists in the parallel world of the fast trains. The 21.22 has a portion for Briançon in south-east France, and this is detached at Valence Ville at about 3.30am.

  THE CURIOUS INCIDENT

  I woke for a third time and groped for my mobile phone. It was 06.16, a permissible time to get up, and there was enough light filtering in to see the locks on the door, which I opened as quietly as possible. Further light spilled in from the corridor, revealing something grey and furry on the opposite upper bunk. A dog? But it might easily have been a grey furry coat or wrap, especially since it seemed to be completely motionless. The corridor was deserted. We were passing hills and trees that resembled either church spires or lollipops. The sea would be on the other side. In the vestibule at the carriage end, the window of the door was largely obscured by a label reading ‘Voiture 16’, but there was the sea, looking rather grey beneath a pale blue-and-white sky.

  Fifteen minutes later, we rattled through a tiny station: a pretty little pink temple almost overwhelmed by two big bushes of red bougainvillea – and illuminated by bright sunshine. All the travails of the journey were instantly worth it. The station was Cassis, about ten miles east along the coast from Marseilles. The old Blue Train would have called at Marseilles St Charles, the main station, but we had cut the corner, avoiding central Marseilles by means of the by-pass called Raccordement des Chartreux. (Only the French can make an avoiding line sound beautiful.)

  The backpacker had also emerged from the compartment, and he was standing in the corridor, his bag neatly packed. He gave me the same minimal nod of the night before. His mobile phone was charging in what had been intended as a shaver socket. Here is George Behrend, from Grand European Expresses:

  As you carefully adjust your electric razor to the 110 volts of the Wagons-Lits supply, perhaps you think of all the many journeys made before that wonderful new system was fitted, when you struggled with a safety razor and pondered how an earlier generation, armed only with a cut-throat, could appear sleek at the breakfast table, with chins unornamented with cotton wool. The answer? They made full use of any stops.

  (Behrend regretted the gradual replacement of multilingual notices explaining about the shaver sockets, in favour of a small stylised drawing of a man shaving.)

  The window in the door now disclosed swimming pools with water slides, palm trees, an industrial estate and a freight yard. Even the graffiti on the wagons in the freight yard was starting to look picturesque. At 06.42 we called at Toulon, and the backpacker walked away along the platform. As we departed – now heading away from the sea – I saw another leaflet on the carriage floor promising breakfast. I began walking along the train until I came to a recessed booth in the next couchette carriage. It was billed as ‘Point Information’, and a uniformed official was standing in it, looking through the window on the landward side. I held up the leaflet, and asked in my broken French about breakfast. He answered courteously: ‘I am sorry but I am not the train manager. There are two ladies. I think they are that way.’ He pointed west, so I began walking that way until I came to the end of the train. There had been no two ladies, with or without breakfast. On the other hand, here was an end-door with a window looking directly onto the receding tracks.

  The dining car – as it had become chic in the 1920s to call the Voiture Restaurant – disappeared from the Paris-Nice night train in 2007, and with it went the doggedly English Blue Train breakfast: eggs, bacon and tomato, cooked on an open, coal-fired range.

  In My Friend Maigret, the Inspector accompanies the Englishman, Pyke, to the restaurant car, observing him warily: ‘A slight contraction of the nostrils on the arrival of the bacon and eggs, which were indisputably not as good as in his own country.’ The waiter, who knows Maigret, comes up and asks an embarrassing question ‘in an insinuating voice’: ‘Something to drink, as usual?’

  At Fréjus-St-Raphaël we rejoined the sea, running past the pretty, but deserted, beach at Agay. If anyone had been standing on that beach, they could have watched the train crossing the Viaduc d’Anthéor, which is depicted in a famous Wagons-Lits poster captioned ‘Summer on the French Riviera by the Blue Train’. On the beach are candy-striped parasols; the sea is dotted with white sails. The Blue Train itself is impossibly elevated, as small in the sky as an aeroplane.

  A few minutes later, we pulled into Cannes. In the early 1960s George Behrend had observed ‘a galaxy of gold-braided officials and porters’ at Cannes. In 2015, there were no officials at all to be seen. Amongst those alighting were the French couple. They each pulled a big, wheeled suitcase along the platform, but … no dog. As the train eased away, I darted back into the compartment, which was now empty except for my things. The couple had left their beds neatly made up, but the top bunk was covered with grey hairs. So there presumably had been a dog, but why had they not been walking it along the platform? Perhaps they had given it to someone at or before the previous station, Les Arcs, and that other person had carried it off the train? But as far as I could tell, the French couple hadn’t emerged from their compartment until Cannes. Or perhaps the dog had been put in one of the wheeled suitcases, which begs the question of how it could breathe … The episode goes down as ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog on the Night Train’, and it would have been even more imponderable in Wagons-Lits days. A
ccording to one student of the company: ‘I know of no regulations concerning dogs. Probably you could bring one if you bribed the conductor, but remember that many of the passengers in the early days were British, and dogs had to go into quarantine if they were taken from the continent back into Britain.’ In Orient Express, Michael Barsley quotes an article by Joseph Wechsberg in the New Yorker of 22 April 1950, relating how ‘one Katharina Schratt, actress at Vienna’s Burg-theater and a favourite of the Emperor Franz Joseph, would have her dogs with her on the train, and the chef in the wagon-restaurant would make special dishes for them; their favourite was schnitzel.’3

  Juan-les-Pins was approaching, with a countdown of trackside palm trees and the sparkling sea beyond. Then we went inland again, by-passing the Cap d’Antibes, on which stands one of the world’s most luxurious hotels, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. It’s a heavenly chateau with a kind of annexe on a cliff overlooking the sea. In 1923, Gerald and Sara Murphy, American socialites, held a season of parties at what was then the Hôtel du Cap, which they persuaded to stay open in what was considered the ‘off season’: summer. This was a staging post on the way to Nice becoming a summer resort. Another was Coco Chanel’s proud flaunting of her suntan, making the look acceptable in fashionable society. (The glamorous Dick and Nicole Diver, the neurotic principals of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s terrific novel Tender is the Night, are based on the Murphys.)

  As we approached Nice, the only passengers remaining in the carriage were two young men from Cambodia. They were both eating raw carrots, but this was only a snack, because, as one of them explained, ‘We will have breakfast in Nice, then we transit to Monaco.’ What had he made of the trip? ‘In Cambodia, everybody drives, so this has a very, like, old feeling. And we had to take pills to get to sleep, but we saved 800 dollars by not flying from Nice to Monaco.’