Venice is about other things than railways, and even accounts of the Simplon Orient Express (the most famous train to call there) pass over it pretty quickly. But it was the favourite railway destination of Paul Morand, who preferred the original Santa Lucia, erected on the site of a church whose name the station inherited in 1861, and which ‘consisted of three arcades which had turned green from the damp and had been blackened by the coal smoke’. The modern station, like the old one, is right on the Grand Canal – a reminder that all arriving trains have to reverse out to proceed – and on this suddenly very sunny morning, the conjunction was uplifting, like that of a luxury hotel and its pool.
On the station steps, a dozen men of Middle Eastern appearance were holding a demonstration, but more in sorrow than anger. Their placards showed white and black hands intertwined, and a slogan that translated as ‘We are Italians too.’ This must relate to the Paris attacks. A few metres away, a Jewish man dressed in Hasidic black was being accosted by a street trader offering brightly coloured selfie sticks: ‘Do you have one in black?’ the Jewish man asked. (Morand wrote of the tourists of Venice: ‘Those Leicas, these Zeiss; do people no longer have eyes?’)
I began walking through the Venetian labyrinth to my hotel, following the stencilled street-corner directions marked either ‘Per St Marco’ or ‘Per Rialto’. The guidance is given rather grudgingly, appearing only on every third or fourth corner, but the elegance of the lettering and the prettiness of the crumbling walls on which it appears is disarming. Those walls are ochre-coloured or yellow; the house windows tended to feature potted plants of an ultravivid green. I seemed to be walking through a hand-tinted postcard.
It would be necessary to cross St Mark’s Square to reach my hotel, but all the possible alleyways leading to the square were blocked by policemen who didn’t speak English, and a line of tape. I then heard, from the direction of the square, a band striking up ‘La Marseillaise’. A woman standing outside an antique shop smiled sadly at me, as if to say, ‘Now do you understand?’ Looking towards the square, I glimpsed – through the gap between two churches – a coffin, carried on the shoulders of six gondoliers. Of course: a young Venetian woman had been killed in the Paris attacks.
All through a day of golden winter sun, that funeral stayed with me. Morand quotes ran through my mind: ‘The privately owned gondolas at their moorings nod their iron prows sadly as we pass by; we disturb their slumber.’ Also, ‘The cats are the vultures of Venice’, and ‘A person’s life frequently resembles those palazzi on the Grand Canal where the lower floors were begun with an array of stones carved in the shapes of diamonds, and whose upper floors were hastily completed with dried mud.’
After checking into my hotel, I took a vaporetto to the Lido, where I had the beach and, apparently, the Mediterranean Sea to myself. I thought about my father, who had taken my sister and me to Venice, and the Lido, as an excursion from one of our stays in Lido di Jesolo. I cannot now remember how we got from one place to the other, but I do remember my dad at early evening on the Lido in full holiday rig: not only the holiday cravat, but a cotton jumper over his shoulders. He had reverted to the way he looked in the opening pages of our family photo album, in the pictures taken before he met my mother. The Venice Lido was a kind of benchmark of glamour to him: I think because a typical British visitor – without benefit of belonging to the British Railwaymen’s Touring Club – might not know about it.
As the boat took me back, the sky was turning pink as the sun descended into the waters of the lagoon, and the clanking church bells combined somehow harmoniously with the growling of the boat’s engine. I saw, ahead of us, some more gondoliers removed from their usual habitat: half a dozen of them, in their straw boaters and stripy shirts, were standing and rowing an outsized, seagoing gondola across the choppy waters of the lagoon while shouting rhythmically in unison. Was this a self-improvement exercise for the oarsmen? A chap might easily become complacent and soft if always confined to the sleepy canals. Or maybe it was an affirmation of the proud Venetian identity in difficult times.
EASYJET
At the bus garage, where I waited for the shuttle to the airport, I kept seeing double-deckers with ‘Lido di Jesolo’ on the front, which was slightly depressing, putting that Shangri La of my boyhood on a level with Camberwell or Sydenham. But those buses did solve the mystery of how we’d travelled from one lido to the other on our family holidays.
I flew back to London on easyJet, with the usual rail-enthusiast’s feeling of fraternising with the enemy. Even though the aeroplane has been the ‘traditional’ method by which the British have accessed Europe since the mid-1950s (when British European Airways began offering cheap flights to European capitals), it has never become romantic, except to a tiny number of connoisseurs. Nobody goes ‘interplaneing’ on their gap year.
Stowing my bag in the overhead locker, I wondered to what extent the unlikelihood of anyone being able to raid my wallet on the plane compensated for the blandness of the experience. Certainly, as I write this, I have forgotten all but the barest details of the flight, whereas I have recounted my night train journey to Venice with hardly a glance at my notebook.
POSTSCRIPT
As I was finishing this book, I learnt that Transdev was relinquishing its holding in Thello, the business having ‘not grown as much as we were hoping’. The Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015 were mentioned as a contributory factor. Where this leaves the overnight service from Paris to Venice is unclear at the time of writing.
4
THE ‘ORIENT EXPRESS’
WHICH ORIENT EXPRESS DO YOU WANT?
On that morning’s Eurostar from London to Paris, I had been reminded of Wagons-Lits: by the livery of the new Eurostar carriages, the excitingly named e320 class. The predominantly cream colour of the old trains has been succeeded by mid-blue with a yellow stripe, which is nearly the midnight blue and gold of W-L, although apparently no homage is intended. I had then made ‘the change at Paris’ in its easiest and shortest form, walking from Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est, which takes five minutes, and you really can’t go wrong if you follow the Rue des Deux Gares. In Nairn’s Paris, Ian Nairn recommends this pedestrian approach to Gare de l’Est: ‘platform roofs almost as far as the eye can see, a human meat market beyond the dreams of Smithfield’. He rated it ‘the best of the Parisian train sheds’, but the distinction of the station is traditionally found elsewhere. In The Railway Station: A Social History, Richards and MacKenzie write that Est has been ‘long regarded as the finest station in the world’, because it is ‘the model head station’. The dominant feature of the head station is the ‘head building’ running at right angles to the tracks, as opposed to the hump of the train shed. The head station is focused on the people rather than the trains. Passengers mingle in the head building, or filter through it on their way to the platforms, and there is a great sense of lateral freedom on the concourse at Gare de l’Est, which was doubled in length in the 1930s. But this long, wide building has been filled up with shops and cafés, so that it now resembles a generic shopping mall.
Gare de l’Est is neither compellingly gloomy, like Gare du Nord, nor upbeat like Gare de Lyon. It seems caught between two moods. On the one hand, troops departed from the station in 1870, 1914 and 1939, which explains why Georges Simenon had found ‘a heavy feeling’ in the Gare. The concourse is dominated by Albert Herter’s painting showing troops entraining in 1914. It was painted in memory of his son, Everit-Albert Herter, who had fallen in action in 1918. Richards and Mackenzie write: ‘A platform is seen, with the troops boarding a train, and elderly parents seeing off their sons, young children their fathers and grieving wives their husbands … The prevailing mood is sombre. There is none of the jubilation and euphoria that really attended the outbreak of war.’ The other famous Gare de l’Est leave-taking – the first ever departure of the Orient Express – was a happy event, even in retrospect, and I would be keeping it in mind during my own journey,
which would involve more than one ‘magic carpet to the east,’ as Nagelmackers shamelessly called his own train.
***
After a long expiration, the Orient Express disappeared from the European Timetables in 2009, but I wanted to duplicate the experience as far as possible. Ffestiniog Travel, being railway specialists, did not flinch when I set out my aim, but the consultant asked, ‘Which Orient Express do you have in mind?’
The one usually invoked is the Simplon Orient Express, which became the fashionable route after the First World War, when Germany was shunned. It ran to Constantinople from Paris Gare de Lyon via Switzerland, Venice, Trieste, Belgrade and Sofia. But the Simplon did not appeal as a model, firstly because it involved too much of the Balkans and the Balkans give me a headache. Secondly, I’d already covered the first part of that route in my journey aboard the Thello train, and the Simplon is overexposed in literature. It is the setting, for example, of both Murder on the Orient Express and From Russia with Love. Another consideration was that the Gare de Lyon has never displaced Gare de l’Est in my mind as the definitive starting point of the Orient Express.
On 4 October 1883, the first Express d’Orient – as the train was known until 1891, when its name was changed to the Orient Express, in acknowledgement that the British and Americans were its main customers – departed from Gare de l’Est (or the Gare de Strasbourg, as it was then known). This very first trip was over a special, provisional route. It went Strasbourg-Munich-Vienna-Budapest-Bucharest, then to Giurgiu on the Danube in Romania. Passengers would cross the Danube by ferry to Rustchuk in Bulgaria, where they took a train to Varna on the Black Sea (‘the sea capital of Bulgaria’). From there they would begin a fourteen-hour voyage to Constantinople, and if that sounds a bit watery, well, this was called the Maritime Route. Owing to local times not being synchronised, the journey took 81 hours 40 minutes eastbound, and 77 hours 49 minutes the other way. For the next six years, the route was slightly different, but still involved a boat. The railway connection between Paris and Constantinople would not be completed until 1889. This would take the train from Budapest to Belgrade to Niš, in Serbia. It would then go through Bulgaria, via Sofia and Svilengrad, entering Turkey at Edirne. The train called daily at Vienna. Twice a week, the train terminated at Bucharest. The big production number, the run to Constantinople, happened three times a week. The Constantinople approach of this – the plain Orient Express – was combined with that of the Simplon Orient between Belgrade and Constantinople when the Simplon was inaugurated after the First World War.
But let us revert to October 1883, and the Maritime Route. The inaugural journey was staged as a publicity stunt by Georges Nagelmackers. Crowds streamed along the Boulevard de Magenta for the big send-off, just as if they personally knew the people who were travelling, or as if this were a rocket launch rather than the departure of the 18.00 for Constantinople. The Gare de l’Est was newly illuminated by electric lights. The Orient Express was not yet blue, but its varnished teak carriages compared favourably to some worn-out green ‘Boudoir Cars’ of the Colonel Mann era that Nagelmackers had arranged to be marshalled on the next platform to show how he had progressed since his association with that dubious American. Nagelmackers himself would be travelling, as would various of his top-hatted sponsors, as well as a few French and Belgian government ministers and the Paris chargé d’affaires of the Ottoman Empire. And there was a party of journalists for this most momentous of freebies, principally two fat dandies. The first was Edmond About, a bestselling French novelist and bon viveur. (His account of the trip, De Pontoise à Stamboul, has never been available in English.) There was also Henri Opper de Blowtiz (‘Ce nom!’ exclaimed Jean des Cars in Sleeping Story). Opper de Blowtiz was a literal Bohemian by birth, and Paris correspondent of The Times.
Behind the engine was a fourgon, carrying mail, to help the train pay its way, after which came two sleeping cars of an unnamed type (W-L had not yet embarked on its series of standard cars). There was also a restaurant car and another fourgon crammed with such essentials as wine, champagne, brandies, cigars and (a railway first) ice. One thinks of the Orient Express as a long train, because it went a long way, but it seldom involved more than half a dozen carriages. The train was meant to depart at six o’clock, but was impeded by the press of well-wishers on the platform. It left at twenty past; other trains on the main line to Strasbourg were held back on branches.
Edmond About was impressed by his accommodation, as E. H. Cookridge wrote in his book, Orient Express:
In his account he extolled the teak and mahogany panelling with inlaid marquetry of the compartment walls and car doors, the deep armchairs covered in soft Spanish leather embossed in gold patterning, the spring loaded roller blinds … augmented by the flowered-damask drapes held back when not in use by silk cords and tassels of gold thread. When the seats were converted to beds for the night, they were covered with silk sheets, the finest wool blankets, and counterpanes filled with the lightest of eiderdown. He pressed the bell, which immediately brought the attendant …
TO MUNICH
My own departure would be by TGV: the 15.25 to Munich. I regretted that my itinerary did not allow a later train. The old Orient Express was always an evening departure, with dinner a more or less immediate treat at what Wagons-Lits would call, in later publicity for their catering service, ‘L’Heure Agréable’. The Russians have the right idea. The three-times-a-week RZD sleeper to Moscow leaves Gare de l’Est at 18.58. It was no consolation to think that I could have started out on a night train as recently as December 2014, when the City Night Line sleeper from Paris to Munich ran for the last time.
The TGV Est was a plush duplex with a joint French-German crew. The Ligne à Grande Vitesse Est, over which it would be running towards Strasbourg, is considered the first stage of a European Union project called the Main Line for Europe, which will provide high-speed services between Paris and Bratislava, with a branch to Bucharest. It is scheduled to be completed in 2020, and has been likened to a modern version of the Orient Express route – but there will be no sleeper trains on it.
The TGV was half full. My only complaint was that the second class (which I was in) was pale blue, whereas first class was seductive, bordello-like reds and purples. On the new Eurostars, too, standard class is a cold colour, with pale-blue carpets, whereas business premier is a warmer colour, with a red carpet. It seems unfair that standard class travellers should be gratuitously penalised in this way.
My booked seat turned out to be alongside a middle-aged man who spoke continuously to himself in German. He didn’t seem at all dangerous. In fact, he wore a duffle coat with a badge showing the dove of peace, with an olive branch in its beak. Even so, I moved pretty sharply to an empty seat, about which I began to feel guilty when the German started showing signs of normality – muttering less, and reading the sports section of an English newspaper (The Times).
A certain jumpiness might have been permissible. My destination, Turkey, was suffering shockwaves from the Syrian war. On the day I’d booked my tickets, 17 February 2016, there had been a terrorist attack on the capital, Ankara. In January, a party of tourists had been killed in Istanbul itself, and the Foreign Office was urging British visitors to ‘exercise caution’. When I suggested to the native Turk who runs my local news agent that it was an ‘interesting’ time to be going, he said, ‘Not really … but you should be OK if you stay in your hotel room.’
The room rate at that hotel, the Pera Palace, built by Nagelmackers and famed for its Orient Express connections, had proved disturbingly cheap (and well down on what it had been a few months before). The cost of a British Airways return flight was also unexpectedly low, which was just as well because on the day before I bought my euros, Boris Johnson had announced (possibly having flipped a coin) that he favoured Brexit, so sterling had slumped.
I took out my tickets and my European Railway Map. I had a second class ticket on this TGV to Munich. I then had a ticket for the
Hungarian-operated EuroNight train from Munich to Budapest. I would be spending most of the day in Budapest before taking the Romanian EuroNight train to Bucharest, for which I also had a ticket.
The prospect beyond Bucharest looked a bit hazy for me, as it had to the earliest travellers on the Orient Express. (They had not been told by Nagelmackers that boats would be involved; they thought they were going the whole way by train.) According to Ffestiniog Travel, computer booking from Britain did not stretch beyond Bucharest. For that leg, I didn’t have a ticket, only an itinerary. This showed the timings of a night train from Bucharest to Istanbul, for which I would have to buy the ticket in Bucharest. Some photos on the Man in Seat 61 website suggested that this train not only existed, but had a name: Bosfor. But even if I caught it, I expected bother on the final approach. Disruption caused by the digging of the Marmaray Tunnel under the Bosphorus meant that bus replacements were likely.
I was undoubtedly doing something quite silly. For my Ffestiniog tickets alone I had paid £500, with the Eurostar fare and hotel bills on top. A century and a quarter after the running of the first Orient Express, my train journey was bound to take longer than the original eighty-one hours, there no longer being any through service. A flight to Istanbul would have cost about £100 – a journey that would have taken five hours in total, half of which would have been spent reading a paper on the Tube to Heathrow. But part of the appeal of this trip was the proof it offered that history can run backwards. And the Orient Express was always a bizarre train, a lure to the romantic, or to those diplomatic couriers with diplomatic luggage that must be hand-carried and yet was too bulky to be taken onto an aeroplane. In the early days, a steamer from Venice was a more relaxed way of getting to Istanbul, and from 1947 there was a scheduled air service there from Paris.
Night Trains Page 13
