‘So I can’t get a train from Bucharest to Istanbul?’
He shook his head. ‘Not from Bucharest. From Sofia, maybe.’
He was proposing to shunt me off the route of the very first 1883 Orient Express onto the 1889 version, which had, like the Simplon Orient Express, gone to Istanbul via Sofia. As an Orient Express calling point, Sofia had a perfectly good historical pedigree. But to go there from Bucharest would be to go backwards.
Approaching Bucharest we passed sidings full of red or blue ‘vagons de dormit’. In this wide, almost landlocked country, in a region lacking high-speed trains, sleeper business is profitable. You can take sleepers from Bucharest to Arad, Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Timişoara, Tulcea, Suceava. Surely they could spare a couple of carriages for a run to Istanbul?
We pulled into Bucharest Nord station, the main one in the city, and our terminus. It was brightly coloured, scruffy, crowded, with a McDonald’s a prominent feature, and a market going on in a hallway beyond the main concourse. About 50 per cent of the people in the station were smoking, since indoor smoking is not banned in Romania. I walked fast towards a booth on the concourse marked ‘Informaţii’. I didn’t glance backwards to check the departure board, so I didn’t know what, if anything, was leaving at 12.50. The thing was to buy a ticket. Seeing that a party of backpackers was closing in on Informaţii, I broke into a run, which excited a big black dog – one of many strays on the station – who gave chase, barking. I stopped, and he stopped. He wagged his tail, as though in apology. I still had time to be first in the queue for Informaţii.
In answer to ‘Do you speak English?’ a bored-looking woman shrugged, then indicated a booking hall on the other side of the market. Here, at the international ticket window, was a less bored woman.
‘I’d like a ticket for a night train to Istanbul,’ I said, and she smiled mysteriously. She typed something into a computer, printed out a page, tore off a strip and started making corrections by hand. Eventually, she handed over a piece of paper about three inches long and one inch wide. It read as follows:
Bucureşti N. 12.55 [amended in pen to 12.50] – Gorna Oreahoviţa 18.17 TREN
Gorna Oreahoviţa 19.00 – Dimitrovgrad 23.10 AUTO/TREN
Dimitrovgrad 23.27 – Kapıkule 02.30 AUTO [but the word ‘AUTO’ had been crossed out]
Kapıkule 02.56 – Çerkezköy 05.44 TREN [the words ‘Çerkezköy 05.44 TREN’ had been crossed out]
Çerkezköy 06.00 [again, Çerkezköy was crossed out] – Istanbul 07.50 AUTO
This wasn’t the sleeper train called Bosfor, but it was a method – however convoluted – of getting overnight from Bucharest to Istanbul, and so completing an Orient Expresstype journey. It was a shame Çerkezköy was so determinedly crossed out. The Orient Express had got stuck in a snowdrift there in 1929, which had inspired Agatha Christie to write Murder on the Orient Express. Nevertheless, the start and end timings were very close to those of the apparently mythical Bosfor train, and there was no mention of Sofia – a moral victory over the doom-monger of the Ister.
Asked whether any of these trains were sleepers, the woman shook her head:
‘No beds,’ she said.
‘What does “Auto” mean?’
‘Bus.’
‘Why are some things crossed out?’
‘The arrangements are changing all the time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the line is … contracting.’
She laughed, possibly aware that her English was slightly off. She presumably meant that contractors were working on the line – in connection with the Marmaray Tunnel project – rather than that the line was shrinking. I decided to take up my hotel room and make a night of it in Bucharest, so I asked the woman to date the ticket for tomorrow. It cost the equivalent of thirty-five pounds: not bad for 300 miles of railway travel, even with an admixture of buses, and indeed Romania is known among backpackers for the cheapness of its trains.
In two TV adaptions of Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels, Budapest has stood in for Paris, but Bucharest might have been a better bet. It would be cheaper to film in, and is bursting with Parisian-style neoclassical architecture, especially in the Old Town, where most of the restaurants and bars are conveniently clustered. In a short TV film about the Orient Express, made in 1971, Ian Nairn said of Bucharest, ‘You feel that, like Paris, you want to use the city. You can put it on and wear it.’ Budapest, by contrast, he had found ‘rather standing on its architectural dignity’.
This film is mainly remembered for the scene filmed at Munich. After some uncharacteristically dainty reflections on the rebuilt post-war city – ‘Everything feels a bit safer for the pedestrian than it used to be … They’ve built in arcades all over the place’ – Nairn went to the Oktoberfest, a fatal move for a man for whom ten pints of beer was an aperitif. He blunders through the crowd, elbowing people aside in a manner hardly Reithian (‘Excuse me, mate’), while giving one of the great, inebriated pieces to camera: ‘This is not a beer festival, it’s more of a convulsion.’ His essential critique was that too many tourists were involved in this legitimate ‘expression of German identity’. As Jonathan Meades says, in his introduction to the repackaged films in 1990, ‘Ian Nairn on the Orient Express? Sounds wrong somehow. But this was made before the train was sprayed with essence of corporate hospitality [he must be speaking of the tourist train, the Venice Simplon Orient Express]. It was a real train then, with a destinational purpose, besides leisure.’
In Bucharest, I went to look at Ceauşescu’s celebrated folly of a parliament building. It took twenty minutes to traverse the front of it. Ceauşescu and his diplomats and aides – always travelling in first class – helped sustain the Orient Express in its later years. They were among the few Romanians who could afford to use it.
THE LONG NIGHT
I had read that while Romania had many sleepers, it had no diners, and so, walking back to the station the next morning, I bought a bottle of mineral water, a packet of dried apricots, a Mars bar, a small loaf of bread (which would turn out to be cake), two cheese-and-ham rolls and a packet of processed cheese.
The departure board showed the first of my trains, the 12.55, as terminating at Sofia, but I would be leaving that train – and the line to Sofia – before it started heading west in earnest. I would be doing this at Gorna Oreahoviţa, where a connection would take me south. I had not been able to find this place – the lynchpin of my entire journey – on my railway map. Nor could I find ‘Gorna Oryahovitsa’, as it is also known, but Google offered the assurance that it was ‘an important railway junction in northern Bulgaria’, and I had located the likely intersection of lines, and determinedly written the name on the map.
With half an hour to kill, I sat on a platform bench, and watched the trains; a far more interesting exercise than it would be in Britain. Most were loco-hauled (both electric and diesel), sometimes with carriages that appeared to date from the communist era, but there were also brand-new double-decker diesel multiple units. The black dog came up, and I gave him half the cake-bread. On the opposite platform a man with a long-handled hammer was tapping the carriage wheels of a newly arrived train. He was testing their soundness. If they rang with a true note, they were un-cracked. (Today in Britain, wheels are tested more discreetly, in depots, by means of ultrasound scanning.) A man with a hose started watering a flower display in a hanging basket; the dog went off to lick up some of the water leaking from it. Having finished with the newly arrived train, the hammer man was now absent-mindedly tapping his hammer against a buffer stop. The danger of equipping a man with such a hammer might be that he starts neurotically testing the soundness of everything, including eventually his wife’s head.
The 12.55 now shambled into the furthermost platform: three ancient-looking red-and-cream coaches and a diesel loco. It was a ‘Regio’ service, the humblest and slowest category. But it was compartment stock, and I knew I would like this train. The compartment held six brown-and-grey vinyl seat
s and a wide openable window, which is all you really need on a train. As I settled in, I heard from the corridor a small American voice: ‘Do you like kryptonite?’
The speaker was a boy of about five. He was followed by his mother, who was hauling two big suitcases and saying, ‘Why would I like kryptonite? Kryptonite can kill Superman!’
Stepping out of my compartment, I said, ‘You’re not going to Istanbul, are you?’
‘That’s the idea,’ said the woman. ‘We have to change at Sofia, I think.’
I scotched that old wives’ tale, and told her about Gorna Oreahoviţa.
‘Where?’ she said.
We agreed to consult later, and she went off and found a compartment.
The train departed on time, and began dawdling through the sunlit countryside. We would be crossing the Romania-Bulgaria border at Giurgiu, travelling over a line built by the British firm of John Trevor Barkley between 1865 and 1869, on a commission from the King of Romania. Some fields had been set on fire, to prepare them for the new crop. Whenever we passed a river bank, a certain part of it seemed to have spontaneously become a rubbish dump. We passed small oilfields, and spooky, giant grain silos. A ticket collector appeared: he didn’t flinch at the sight of the word ‘Istanbul’ on my ticket, but merely made a note on the back. I mentioned Gorna Oreahoviţa, and he said, ‘Ask again in Bulgaria.’
We came slowly into Videle: a red-brick bungalow of a station building; three yellow dogs sleeping on the platform; a water tower. Here we left the main line, and we were on un-electrified single track (hence the diesel loco) almost hidden by the grass growing between the sleepers. I know a man who once walked across Europe to Istanbul, and in Romania he was nearly run down by a train, the line having been hidden beneath grass.
At 4pm we came to Giurgiu, the border station: specifically, Giurgiu Nord. A uniformed official approached from the handsome, Italianate station building. He boarded the train and asked to see my passport, then nodded politely and turned and walked away with it. This was obviously going to be a long stop, so I walked along the corridor of the almost-empty train, to confer with the American woman. I will call her Sarah. Her son was watching an animated Superman film on a laptop while eating Pringles. Without looking up from the screen, he held up the Pringles tube, inviting me – with the single word ‘Sir’ – to take one. Sarah was apprehensive that the passport man would need proof of the boy’s paternity. ‘Where’s papa?’ Romanian officials had tended to ask her, during her month in the country. She was divorced and ‘goofing about in Europe’ for a few months while between jobs. One of the big suitcases held schoolbooks for her son, so she could keep up his education en route. She was taking the train from Bucharest to Istanbul because it would have cost her 600 dollars to fly with the boy.
Standing on the platform was an American man, nothing to do with the woman. He wore wraparound shades and a baseball cap. ‘Just looking at the loco,’ he said. ‘It comes from Detroit, of all places.’ (It had been made there, by General Motors.) I asked whether he was going to Istanbul. ‘No I am not,’ he said emphatically. ‘I checked on the Internet, and it said “Don’t go to Istanbul.”’ He was going to Sofia instead.
As we looked on, the GM diesel loco was detached, and an electric loco was put on. (Both Romania and Bulgaria have a higher percentage of electrified lines than Britain, as do Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and Switzerland. Top of the tree is Switzerland, with no un-electrified lines). The driver was guided backwards by a series of whistle blasts from a platform guard, like a sheepdog.
We pulled away, and began trundling over the Danube. We were on what is apparently the longest steel bridge in Europe. It used to be called, in that mawkish, communist way, ‘The Friendship Bridge’, but now it’s ‘Danube Bridge Number 1’. It was quite rusty. The Bulgarian town of Ruse, looming ahead, seemed full of smoking chimneys, cranes and cooling towers. Ruse has also changed its name. It used to be called, less poetically, Rustchuk, and it has beautiful neo-baroque architecture in the centre. It was Rustchuk when the passengers on that very first Orient Express had called there. At that point they were on a boat, which they had boarded at Giurgiu. There was no bridge in those days. At Rustchuk they were put on a different train, borrowed by Nagelmackers from Austria, and taken to Varna, where they would sail for Constantinople. (Rustchuk, incidentally, is a pivotal location in John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle. Buchan may well have become aware of it while on the Orient Express, on which he travelled in spring, 1910.)
At Ruse, there was another passport check. Afterwards, flat plains give way to hills, and we began heading south. The original party, aiming for Varna, would have gone east. A mood of depression apparently prevailed. They had been greeted sullenly by a few Russian soldiers at Rustchuk, Bulgaria being under Russian control at that time, and they had not been warned about the maritime element of the route. Nor had they been warned, until now, that the stretch to Varna was bandit country. Opper de Blowitz sat on the train with his pistol in his hand.
Bulgaria would always be a bête noire for the Orient Express. It was the last piece in the jigsaw for Nagelmackers when he’d been assembling the original route. In the 1930s, the Wagons-Lits company had to contend with King Boris III. He was a rail enthusiast and a member of the Bulgarian railwaymen’s union, who treated the Orient Express like his own personal garden railway. He liked to travel on the footplate, preferably taking the controls. It is said that, in 1934, he was on the footplate when a blowback of flames from the firehole set the overalls of the driver alight. King Boris then doused the flames, and took over the controls, saving the driver and possibly the train by driving it on to Varna. There is a darker version of this story, according to which Boris caused the blowback by over-firing, and the driver died.
In communist days, officials tried to belittle a train considered ideologically unsound. In 1949, an American journalist, Roy Rowan, reported in Life magazine that ‘The Bulgarians flag the train at every mudhole.’ Dining cars might not be attached as promised, and meals had to be taken ‘ashore’ – not on the train.
In On the Old Lines (1957), Peter Allen, historian, sometime deputy chairman of ICI and a member of the Stephenson Locomotive Society, described a post-war run on the Simplon Orient Express: ‘From Paris through to Trieste, it was a pretty respectable fast train by any standards. Next morning, however, as we got near Ljubljana, the first Yugoslav town of any size, we were clattering along through farming country in pretty disreputable company, some very elderly coaches attached to the back of us and some cattle trucks next to the engine.’ Things got worse, and ‘We ran through the Bulgarian border as a local, stopping at all stations.’ Incessant shunting of the train always made it hard to keep track of the fourgon or baggage wagon, so that, as the explorer Barbara Mons reported in her book, High Road to Hunza (1958), ‘it proved impossible to apply the maxim – “never lose sight of your luggage”’.
All that said, the Bulgarian ticket inspector was amiable, and spoke decent English. He confirmed that Gorna Oreahoviţa was where I’d put it on my map – which was just as well, since all the station nameplates were now in Cyrillic, if they appeared at all. (What always did appear on the platforms was a smart stationmaster in a red cap.)
I asked the ticket inspector what had happened to the sleeper to Istanbul. ‘Stopped,’ he said.
‘For how long?’
‘Two years.’
Gorna Oreahoviţa was a dark, deserted station, with an underpass leading towards several platforms, none of which were numbered. Sarah and I chose one set of stairs at random, and came up next to a train. We wanted the connection to Dimitrovgrad, in eastern Bulgaria. Was this it? The indicator board was blank. A guard was leaning out of a carriage window. ‘Is this for Dimitrovgrad?’ I asked, and he slowly shook his head. So we just stood on the platform for the next quarter of an hour, with the train (electric loco, ancient compartment stock) simmering away alongside us, and the guard intermittently looking down at us fro
m various windows and doors. A female guard now emerged from a station building and boarded the train. Sarah asked her, ‘Is this the train for Dimitrovgrad?’ and she shook her head. It was only five-to-seven, but the station had essentially closed except for this one train. It had to be the service for Dimitrovgrad, which, according to the itinerary, would be departing in five minutes. It was then I remembered having read that in a certain Balkan countries, the people shook their heads to mean ‘Yes’ and nodded to mean ‘No’. We boarded the train.
The journey now became vague. It was pitch black outside, apart from illuminated signs that often seemed to be high above us, or elevated factories, made luminous and ghostly by pale grey concrete. There was no water in the WC, either for the taps or the flushing of the loo. That ought not to have mattered because the toilet was just a hole onto the tracks. Yet still the toilet reeked, and the reek permeated the compartment of lumpy green vinyl seats. On that original Orient Express, Edmond About had – according to E. H. Cookridge – been ‘impressed by the fresh towels, tablets of soap, and vials of toilet water beside the washbowl – a service, he mentioned, that was not provided even in the most expensive hotels that he frequently patronized in all parts of Europe’. As for the toilet itself, he noted that a servant stepped into the water closet, to clean it after every use.
We arrived at Dimitrovgrad on time at ten past eleven. We were now on the line that had formed the home straight for both the Orient Express and the Simplon Orient Express, although this particular Dimitrovgrad did not exist as a town until the late 1940s. There is another Dimitrovgrad (formerly called Caribrod) in Serbia. Both towns are named after Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian communist leader who favoured the creation of a Balkan Federation. (He was in Germany in the 1930s, and was charged with complicity in the Reichstag fire. Dimitrov defended himself eloquently in court, and was acquitted.)
We stepped down with the one remaining passenger on the train: an old woman with gold teeth, who I assumed to be Turkish. The train to Kapıkule was due at 23.27; it was now 23.22. Besides us travellers, three people remained in the bleak, dark station of Dimitrovgrad: two policemen smoking in the station building, and a man coming along the platform jauntily swinging one of the wheel-testing hammers. He banged it against a few wheels of the train from Gorna. The possible Turkish woman asked him a question and he made no response at all. Did this imply some geopolitical tension? It bothered me that she had felt the need to ask a question, because I’d put her down as somebody who knew the ropes. The train from Gorna pulled away empty, leaving behind a deeper silence than before. It was now 23.27 exactly. (In Dracula, Jonathan Harker says, ‘It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?’ This had not been my experience, until now.)
Night Trains Page 17
