I rode Line 1 to Hősök tere (Heroes Square), which is next to City Park, where the Transport Museum is located. I walked for forty minutes through City Park in search of the museum, wondering whether the charming old trolleybuses passing through the park were anything to do with it. (They are not.) On some litter bins, the word ‘Migrant’ appeared in graffiti, accompanied by an arrow pointing towards the top of the bin. The writers of that graffiti had probably never seen the film Daniel Takes a Train, which was made in 1983 and set in 1956, when many Hungarians became refugees and poured onto the trains at Keleti to flee the Russian invasion. I reached the museum to be confronted with a rusty steam locomotive and a sign: ‘Closed for Reconstruction’.
***
In Keleti Station at half past five, rush hour was underway, and a female announcer with a sexy voice like Zsa Zsa Gabor was reeling off trains and times. Most trains on the big departure board were locals, and marked ‘Személy’ which means ‘stops at all stations’ (‘Sebes’ means ‘stops at nearly all’). But there were also plenty of international services, as befitting a landlocked country in the centre of Europe. The star departure was a sleek red-and-black Railjet (Austrian high-speed) train to Munich via Vienna. Budapest is the most easterly point of the Railjet network. The trains have three classes, so it’s like England before 1875, when the Midland Railway abolished second class and began the trend towards two rather than three classes. Although capable of 143mph, the Railjets are strangely antiquated in another sense: the top class carriages have compartments of a sort. The partitions do not extend to ceiling height, but there is a still a sense of cosy seclusion. There were also a couple of not-quite-high-speed Eurocity trains, to Brno and Vienna, because Hungary is part of that international network as well. Eurocity services (which took over from the Trans-European Expresses) only run between 6am and midnight, but they and other fast trains have undermined the need for night trains thereafter. A couple of years earlier, a train for Russia would have been indicated on the board, and it would have gone via Kiev, but in the wake of its Ukrainian intervention, Russia suspended services to EU countries running through Kiev.
I noticed the station restaurant, the entrance bedecked with fairy lights. The interior was wood-panelled, redolent of faded Mitteleuropean glamour. It appeared that the Christmas decorations were still up, with green tinsel entwined around pillars and above the bar. A formally dressed waiter who might easily have been eighty years old approached.
‘Can I have a glass of wine, please?’
‘Naturally,’ he said.
This would have been a good place to have breakfasted, perhaps on ‘soft boiled eggs’ (350 forint, or about a pound) or indeed ‘bacon and eggs’ (850 forint). Other dishes were more exotic, or perhaps made to seem so by faltering English: ‘Gentility barbecued pork chops, gypsy style with pommes’; ‘Medallions of pork, hunter style with potato croquets’; ‘Mozzarella cheese grilled on lava stone’. Particularly intriguing was ‘Bakossy camembert cheese with whortleberry sauce’.
After finishing my wine, I returned to the concourse. EN 473 was now displayed on the indicator, but since it was still only 6.30pm, I could think of nothing better to do than to return to the restaurant for another glass of wine.
‘I’ve come back,’ I said to elderly waiter.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
At seven o’clock, the Ister was ready for boarding.
ISTER
The colour scheme was about right: blue above, white below, with a yellow stripe in the middle. There was one sleeper carriage and one couchette, both probably forty years old. The rest was open seating. My sleeper compartment had wood panelling (or at least wood veneer), in approximation of Wagons-Lits style. On one side was extensive shelving – as if in anticipation of passengers moving in for a week – and a recess for hanging up clothes. On the other side was a dark-blue bench seat with the bunk above, already made up. The carpet was dark grey, thick pile; the blind was black and velvety. The sink in the corner had a plug hole giving straight onto the tracks. On the bunk was a ‘dental kit’ and a big green serviette, serviceable as a towel. All in all, quite a comfortable and well-ordered bedroom. The Romanian sleeping car conductor popped his head in. ‘You like it?’ he asked. I told him I did. ‘Built by Germans,’ he said. ‘The Germans is the best!’ he added, giving the thumbs up sign.5
‘How many stops will there be?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-five,’ he said blithely. ‘Some of them are here.’ And he pointed to a window label giving the highlights:
Szolnok 20.32
Békéscsaba 21.39
Lőkösháza 22.10
Curtici 23.50
Arad 00.29
Deva 02.45
Braşov 09.20
Bucureşti 12.00
Just after Szolnok, I approached the dining car, taking care to carry all my valuables with me. As I passed two big blokes in leather jackets illegally smoking at the end of the corridor, I congratulated myself on taking this precaution.
The dining car consisted firstly of a serving counter, then a sort of cocktail bar area with fixed high stools; next came the blue dining seats and white Formica-topped tables. There were grey curtains, all closed against the wintry darkness beyond the windows. The vibe was British Rail, circa 1974. I felt a sense of loneliness, since the diner was completely empty, and I couldn’t at first even see any maître d’hôtel. Then I noticed a burly, grey-haired chap sitting on a duvet on the floor behind the counter with another duvet wrapped over his knees. He was watching a film on a laptop. Behind him, a makeshift curtain concealed what was probably the food preparation area. He stood up and nodded by way of greeting.
‘I was hoping to have dinner,’ I said, and he nodded again. ‘What have you got?’ I asked, just as I noticed a menu, fixed to the panel next to the counter.
‘That’s all sandwiches,’ the man said, dismissively.
‘Do you have anything hot, then?’
‘Pork with frites and Mexican salad,’ he said.
‘OK, I’ll have that.’
‘Not frites,’ he said, running his hand agitatedly through his hair, ‘I mean boiled potatoes.’
‘Fine.’
‘Do you want a drink?’ he said, indicating a variety of wine bottles wrapped in cellophane with the prices – in euros and forints – written on Post-it notes attached to them. I was somehow reminded of the prizes offered in a shooting gallery at a funfair.
‘I’d like white,’ I said, and the man pointed to a bottle of Riesling for six euros. That was undoubtedly a bargain, however terrible it might be, but I couldn’t face a whole bottle, so I opted for a half bottle of Sauvignon for €2.50. I had thought the half bottle I’d pointed to was merely for display purposes, but the man reached for that very one, uncorked it, and poured it into a plastic glass.
‘Do you have any ice?’ I said.
The man nodded, and ducked behind the curtain, returning with another plastic glass, this one frosted over. I said, ‘You don’t have any actual ice, do you?’ The man nodded again, and disappeared once more behind the curtain. I heard what might have been a sound effect of Chris Bonington going up K2. The man then returned, slightly out of breath, with a plastic glass full of shards of ice, and only now – the man having left the curtain slightly open – did I notice a silent woman in the food preparation area. She was taking meat out of a fridge.
‘Your food will take twenty minutes,’ said the man, and he sat back down on his duvet, and opened his laptop again. I ought not to be too shocked at the duvet. In the heyday of Wagons-Lits, anyone wandering into a dining car in the small hours might see the staff sleeping in hammocks suspended from the roof. The question of where the W-L staff spent the night obviously perplexed Vladimir Nabokov. In Speak, Memory, he recalls a childhood journey on the Nord Express. The underlining is mine:
I would put myself to sleep by the simple act of identifying myself with the engine driver. A sense of drowsy well-being invaded my
veins as soon as I had everything nicely arranged – the carefree passengers in their rooms enjoying the ride I was giving them, smoking, exchanging knowing smiles, nodding, dozing; the waiters and cooks and train guards (whom I had to place somewhere) carousing in the diner; and myself, goggled and begrimed, peering out of the engine cab at the tapering track …
After five minutes, a smell of frying meat began to permeate the carriage. This would be the first time I’d have a properly cooked – as opposed to microwaved – meal on a train since the dining cars were removed from the York to London services in 2011.
The dinner was delicious, the pork cooked in herbs, and accompanied by a well-dressed salad. But when, after ten minutes, I’d consumed it, there was nothing left to do but return to my compartment. Dinner on a night train ought to be an event, not a quick pit stop. It certainly was for George Behrend. Here he is on the Nord Express in the 1960s, making the best of that period of supposed decline in W-L standards, when buffet cars were replacing diners:
Two menus are available in the buffet car, the small one omitting either cheese or sweet. Both begin with Julienne d’Arblay soup, served in those familiar big blue cups. The entrée is Timbale Milanaise … After this the chef de brigade comes round with slices of mouth-watering veal on a silver platter. The Côte de Veau fines herbes is accompanied by Pommes Cocottes (cooked in butter) and creamed spinach. For this is not one of the most expensive menus; it is ordinary, adequately bourgeois, which means that it is elegantly served, carefully prepared and subtly tasteful.
In Stamboul Train by Graham Greene, the character called Myatt eats a remarkably similar meal on the Orient Express in the 1930s, but a Behrend-like enthusiasm has no place in Greene-land. Myatt ‘dipped his spoon into the tasteless Julienne; he preferred his food rich, highly seasoned, but full of a harsh nourishment’. He then chooses a medium Burgundy, a Chamberltin 1923, to drink with the main course of veal, ‘though he knew it a waste of money to buy a good wine, for no bouquet could survive the continuous tremor’. Whereas Behrend says, ‘The rattle of glasses and the swaying motion of the car, mixed with the mellowing effect of the Company’s Listrac, give the meal a pleasant ambience.’ (Listrac claret was practically the ‘house red’ of the post-war Wagons-Lits.)
Behrend lamented the lack of appreciation of Wagons-Lits ‘gastrology’ among his fellow countrymen, whom he found more concerned about cost than taste, and failed to show any imagination when it came to those liqueurs: ‘for our Englishman it is invariably Cointreau, and he has extremely odd ideas about how the flavour is improved by a smut from the engine’. (The English, apparently, liked to open the windows in the dining or buffet cars.) The liqueurs on the Wagons-Lits were always served from large bottles, not the miniatures of today, which are well on the way to being as negligible as chocolate liqueurs.
At 22.10, dead on time, we pulled into Lőkösháza. Here we took our leave from Hungary and the Schengen zone, so there was a passport check. At 22.40 we set off again, and I went to bed. I was awoken at ten to midnight by a loud rapping on the door. I blearily climbed down and unlocked the door, to be confronted by a uniformed Romanian woman, who said ‘Passport check,’ then turned aside, saying, ‘My colleague will look’, because I was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. We were at Curtici, just inside the Romanian border. Here was a neat encapsulation of the virtues of the Schengen agreement: outside it, you are not only checked when leaving one country, but also when entering the next one. My passport was scrutinised for a long time by a uniformed male, who said ‘Welcome to Romania’ when he returned it. During the stop at Curtici – which lasted about an hour – I climbed into my bunk and went back to sleep. Something caused me to awake in the small hours. The train was moving, and there was a man in a grey hoodie standing by my bed. He held a packet of cigarettes.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, sitting up.
‘Oh,’ he said, completely unfazed, ‘I was looking for the sleeping car conductor.’
There was about a 5 per cent chance of this being true. In spite of the Thello incident I had neglected to lock the door after the second passport check, but I had put my passport and wallet under my pillow. As the man exited, with an aggrieved look, the thought occurred to me: ‘What if I’d been a woman?’
In his very droll work, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Paul Theroux describes an episode of Orient Express voyeurism that is no less sinister for being juvenile. He is on the Direct Orient Express. The train is going through Switzerland at breakfast time, and Theroux has just failed to find the dining car (because there was no dining car):
On my way back to Car 99 I was followed by three Swiss boys who, at each compartment door, tried the handle; if it responded they slid the door open and looked in, presumably at people dressing or lounging in bed. Then the boys called out ‘Pardon, Madame!’ or ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ as the occupants hastily covered themselves. As these ingenious voyeurs reached my sleeping car they were in high spirits, hooting and shrieking, but it was always with the greatest politeness that they said, ‘Pardon, Madame!’ once they got the door open.
I woke again at about eight, aware of that old-fashioned railway rhythm: di-dum-di-dum, the sound of jointed, as opposed to continuously welded, rail. The sound went well with the scene beyond the window: thin trees on a hillside, a fast-flowing rocky river (the Olt), smoke rising from the chimney of a ramshackle house, and bright, cold sunshine.
In the dining car, the steward’s duvet and laptop had been packed away. He seemed in a brighter mood than the night before, and his female companion was actually laughing, albeit into a mobile phone. Breakfast, like dinner, was inexplicably delicious: thick, sweet coffee and a ham omelette. There were now other people in the dining car, although nobody else was eating. Some of them watched me eat, with faint scepticism. They seemed a very ascetic lot, determined to forswear Wagons-Lits-type fun. Was it possible they couldn’t afford breakfast? But they all had smartphones …
We came to Braşov, evidently a pretty, medieval town, but the train traveller sees nothing but a low, modern station and a scrapyard. This is the stop for ‘Dracula’s Castle’, or rather Bran Castle, a medieval fortress marketed as such. In the novel, Jonathan Harker goes to visit the Count by train, following the Orient Express route from Munich to Vienna to Budapest. But if he is on the Orient Express, he doesn’t say so. Once in Romania, Harker takes a train to the small town of Bistritz (known as Bistriţa today), which the Count had commended as the nearest to his ‘Castle Dracula’. Bistritz is in the North Carpathian Mountains, whereas Braşov is in the South Carpathians. There are several candidates for the true inspiration of Castle Dracula, which is presumably as Bram Stoker intended, because he makes sure that Harker ‘was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact location of Castle Dracula’.
Harker does namecheck the Orient Express later on, when he returns to Romania to confront the horrible Count: ‘15 October. Varna. We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th, got to Paris the same night and took the places secured for us on the Orient Express. We travelled night and day, arriving here at about five o’clock.’ It’s about as perfunctory a description of a 2,000-mile journey as you could imagine. But Stoker knew his trains. In The Railways: Nation, Network & People, Simon Bradley points out that in 1882 Stoker organised a very successful sixteen-week railway tour for Henry Irving’s theatrical company, adding ‘Perhaps the railway logistics recurred to mind when he came to write Dracula, the pages of which include the text of a very plausible legal document covering the nocturnal despatch by Great Northern Railway goods train of fifty boxes of vampiric soil.’
My rail atlas marks the sixty-mile stretch from Braşov to Ploieşti as one of its ‘selected scenic rail routes’. But the Transylvanian landscape was at variance with the Dracula films: pretty instead of Gothic; mountainous, but not severely so. We did keep going through long tunnels though, and because a loose connection had caused the lights in my compartment to stop work
ing, I was plunged into complete darkness every time; but the day seemed sunnier at each re-emergence.
We were also higher at every emergence, because we were climbing steadily. There were half-hearted enterprises by the tracks: quarries, logging mills or factories that had either long since closed down or never got going. The consistent feature was a complete absence of people. As the landscape flattened the factories became more purposeful-looking, with human beings appearing in their vicinity. We were approaching Bucharest, and the moment of truth about the onward sleeper to Istanbul.
THE CONTRACTING LINE
It was 11.40. In twenty minutes we would be arriving on time at Bucharest. In theory, the Bosfor sleeper for Istanbul – operated by CFR, or Romanian Railways – would be leaving at 12.50. I had taken the precaution of making a cancellable booking at a Bucharest hotel, but it seemed we would make this tight connection, if the Bosfor existed.
The compartment door was open, and the sleeping car conductor was passing by. Asked whether he’d ever heard of the 12.50, he gave his trademark thumbs up, but he added: ‘You check with my friend, though.’ He pointed along the corridor, to another railway official, an altogether steelier-looking character, and possibly a ticket inspector. Even as I began describing the 12.50, this man was shaking his head.
‘Not possible,’ he said.
‘But I was told I could buy a ticket for it in Bucharest.’
‘There might be tickets,’ he said derisively, ‘but there are no trains.’
Night Trains Page 16
