Standing opposite this mouldering pair is a rake of pristine midnight-blue carriages, much more evocative of the golden days of the trains de luxe, to the extent that a visitor might wonder why the Nene Valley bothers with 3916 and 2975. On the carriage sides are enamel plaques reading
Le Train Bleu
(London) Calais-Paris
Nice-St Remo
There are cosy-looking compartments, and a ‘Voiture-Salon-Bar’ with beautiful marquetry and banquette seats. ‘Actually, they’re nothing to do with Wagons-Lits at all,’ a volunteer at the NVR brutally pointed out, on my first visit. ‘They’re from the Belgian state railway in the 1930s. There’s a clue here,’ he said, indicating a sign below the communication cord that read ‘Noodsein’, meaning ‘Alarm’. ‘This was never a bar car, either,’ he added. ‘We converted it from ordinary seating.’ The NVR runs Blue Train-themed dining evenings in these cars. In a nifty piece of legalese, they are referred to as ‘licensed Wagons-Lits-style carriages’. The mocked-up bar car will strike many visitors as being mysteriously familiar, because it stands in for a W-L dining car in the version of Murder on the Orient Express made in 2010 by ITV, and starring David Suchet as Poirot. In fact, there was never any bar car on the Orient Express, but for filming purposes, it is easier to muster the dozen suspects in a bar car than a restaurant car, which is where Poirot convenes them in the novel.
At some point during my NVR visits, I ride up and down the seven-mile line in the orange-and-yellow Swedish diesel rail car called Helga. In Sweden during the 1960s Helga covered 1,996,000 km, which, as the NVR website points out, is the equivalent of going to the moon and back two and a half times. On coming to England she did a melancholic stint as a static exhibit at the Bygone Village, Fleggburgh, Great Yarmouth, then served as a shelter for rainy-day picnics at Tweddle Animal Farm near Hartlepool. Helga is superbly ergonomic, with comfortable seats and a handhold wherever you want one. She is also incredibly wide, like a boat – a pleasure steamer, with the semicircle of windows at either end, through which the pleasantly bland fields on either side of the line quietly unfold. Whatever else is not happening on the NVR, Helga will be running.
It’s fun to see novices climb on board, and slowly work out the foreignness. The door of the WC is marked ‘Toalett’. The loo itself is a sort of porcelain tube, at the bottom of which is … nothing: a hole giving onto the tracks. About two out of every three people who go into the Toalett come straight out again, exclaiming to their friends: ‘It goes straight onto the tracks!’
But for any student of European sleeper trains, the main goal of a visit to the NVR is a few minutes of Phil Marshall’s time, and in early summer of 2016, I managed to collar him. He was driving a dumper truck, but very slowly, and so I was able to walk alongside him for a while. After mentioning the journeys I’d so far made, I sought a recommendation for one final trip.
‘Take the Berlin Night Express,’ he shouted over the noise of the truck’s engine, ‘From Malmö to Berlin! It’s run by a private firm called Snälltåget! They put the train on a boat across the Baltic! It’s the most authentic Wagons-Lits type experience!’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s like the Night Ferry!’
THE NIGHT FERRY
First things first: the Night Ferry was not a ferry; it was a train. It did run at night, though. It ran from Victoria to Dover, where it – or most of it – was shunted onto one of several special train-carrying ferries. These then sailed for three-and-a-quarter hours to Dunkirk, where the train was taken off and ran on to Paris Gare du Nord. The journey also happened in reverse, and one or two carriages ran through to Brussels, after being taken off at Lille.
The Night Ferry first ran on the night of 5 October 1936, featuring specially made sleeping coaches from the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits. They were slightly smaller than the usual W-L rolling stock, being designed to fit the smaller British loading gauge. Even so, the Night Ferry – with perhaps ten of those sleepers, a restaurant and kitchen car, a buffet car and varying quantity of ordinary Southern Railway carriages – was a very heavy train, and in steam days it needed to be hauled by two locomotives. The foremost of these had a circular name board on the smoke-box door, like the end of a giant cotton reel. It bore the words ‘Night Ferry, London-Paris’, and the image of a yellow crescent moon on a pale-blue background.
The carriages were called F-class (for Ferry). There were nine compartments, each with an upper and lower bunk. If a single traveller required sole occupancy that was counted as first class, and the fare was accordingly higher. They were not wood-panelled – that would have been a fire-hazard in the boat hold – but were made of melamine, which was painted brownish to suggest wood. The exteriors did follow the W-L template however, in that they were dark blue, which was unusual in Britain, and people who observed them on the move, running through Kent at about ten o’clock at night, remarked that they seemed to disappear, being essentially the colour of the night – all except the shuttling yellow light from their windows.
On arrival at Dover, those in the ordinary carriages would walk onto the boat. Those in the sleepers would sleep – or they might have done, if they were exceptionally tired or drunk, because if they weren’t woken up by the jerking of the shunting; or the susurration of the sea water as the level was adjusted in the train ferry dock (so as to get the link-span, by which the train boarded the boat, to the right level); or the rattling of the chains by which the carriages were secured in the echoing hold; or the shouting of the blokes who performed this action, then the motion of the sea on a rough night might have done the job – because the Night Ferry offered the novelty of being seasick on a train. There was a porcelain seasickness bowl in every compartment, and luggage was secured in a net. This blurring of travel categories was part of its fascination. There was a lifebelt in every compartment, and those boarding the sleepers had to walk through customs while still in London. The station called Dover Ferry was the only timetabled passenger calling point in Britain with no platform.
It’s not that a train ferry was unprecedented, even within Britain. They had been used to cross the Firths of the Forth and Tay before the waters were bridged in 1890. In 1924, a train ferry from Harwich to Zeebrugge in Belgium was inaugurated, but this was only ever used for freight, which was carried in special white wagons with foreign lettering on them. Sleeper carriages were sometimes put aboard, but there was nobody inside them: they were for export.
The Harwich train ferry – or a good miniature model of it – was in effect the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Number 17. ‘The rambling narrative of jewel thieves, mysterious detectives and hanging bodies borders on the incomprehensible,’ says Peter Ackroyd in his biography of Hitchcock, but when train time comes, things do pick up. The half-ridiculous, half-compelling climax involves freight wagons crashing onto the ferry, in scenes suggestive of Hitchcock playing with toy boats in his bathtub. The train ferry dock at Harwich survives but is rotting away; the installation at Dover is now a gravel depot.
On the Night Ferry, there was also the disorientation of travelling on what was really a French train in Britain. As Michael Williams writes, in his enjoyable book, The Trains Now Departed:
For all its life the Night Ferry was an enclosed world of its own, characterised by the charming Gallic argot used by the staff. Thus the bellows connection between the carriages was known as a soufflet, the trolley for light refreshments as a vente ambulante and the conductor’s hat as a képi.
Also the potty, stored under the sink, was called a ‘vase de nuit’, and passengers were spared the inscription common on such receptacles in purely British sleeping compartments: ‘This utensil is not to be used for solid matter.’ In the early days, the conductors were all French, and according to George Behrend, writing in 1962, one of them ‘happens to live in London, the only staff member of WL to do so’. I imagine this character as living in a small terrace near Victoria, a dapper, impeccably dressed man (even whe
n not wearing his Night Ferry uniform of chocolate brown with gold piping and brass buttons), who, on his mornings off, walks briskly to the one café in London that serves croissants – in those days when croissants were not ubiquitous and terrace houses near Victoria did not cost 2 million pounds. Being French, the Night Ferry was erotic. Commuters at Victoria, arriving from Croydon or Haywards Heath, would peer jealously through the carriage windows to see the tousled red blankets, strewn pages of The Times and lately abandoned breakfast trays.
Today, the train would be called elitist. Immediately after the war, complimentary packets of Palmolive soap, bearing the crescent moon and stars, were supplied, even though soap was being rationed. The Duke of Windsor was a regular on board, and there was special provision for the famous: they could be served breakfast on a tray in their compartments, sparing them the need to appear in the restaurant car. One such VIP was Winston Churchill, and on 16 December 1951, the train stopped at Sevenoaks to collect him (his country seat was at nearby Westerham), the only time the Night Ferry picked up a passenger before Paris.
In the 1960s, a single sleeper fare to Paris was about ten pounds. The man who fired the locomotive that hauled it to Dover was probably on about twenty-five a week. Later, the train suffered the decline usual among W-L services, and it became less French. W-L ceased to operate the train in December 1976, when its management was transferred to SNCF, with BR employees as attendants. It was plagued by strikes in its later years, and eclipsed by aeroplane travel. The Night Ferry came to be viewed as a sort of stately home on wheels, its old-fashioned grandeur appreciated more by its users than its operators.
The International Railway Preservation Society has produced a bilingual book called Ferry Boat de Nuit 1936–1980/Night Ferry 1936–1980, containing memoirs of travelling on the service. One is written by a chap called Tom Scharf, who was on the very last running of the Night Ferry, on 31 October 1980, with his friend Graham: ‘I must confess to a certain amount of dismay at the very utilitarian mushroom-beige paint finish along the corridor and the compartment doors … I shared a compartment with Graham who provided champagne to mark the occasion. We had both dressed in suit and tie out of respect to the old train.’ Tom Scharf was slightly alarmed to find himself crunching through chunks of coke spilled from the stoves, located at the corridor ends, that heated the carriages.
The book is decorated with reproductions of moody paintings, showing nocturnal scenes of carriage loading, usually in the rain, with a few lonely figures in trilbies and macs standing about. Sometimes the contrôleurs at Dunkirk would board the ferry for a nightcap of gin and orange; then they’d have to board the tug that pulled the ferry clear of the docks, in order to return to the port. One of the memoirists recalls some important – or self-important – men turning up at the Dover dockside in a fast car, and demanding to be admitted to the train, evening fog having stopped flights from Heathrow. They were given permission to board, but became agitated at the time it was taking to get the water level in the dock right. I imagine there must have also been some anxious moments at Dover for the most famous fugitive to use the train: Ernest Marples.
If you live in York, as I once did, and you regret the fact that there’s no longer a direct train from there to the pretty seaside town of Whitby; or if you’re a regular at the Glastonbury Festival, but you’re annoyed that you can’t get there directly by train; or if you wonder why Britain is bothering to spend 40 billion pounds to create High Speed Two from nothing when the old Great Central Railway might have provided a readymade route much like the one proposed, then you can blame Dr Richard Beeching, because he closed all those lines as chairman of British Railways. But who – in 1961 – had made Beeching chairman of British Railways? It was the Minister of Transport, Ernest (‘Ernie’, as he liked to be known) Marples. If your property is blighted by the noise of a motorway, you might also be able to blame Marples, because he owned a construction firm that specialised in road building.
He was among that dangerous generation of public servants who found themselves middle aged at the time of the ‘youthquake’. They wanted to join in. If they’d simply bought fast cars or had sex with much younger women (Marples did both), the bad effects might have been confined to their families, but they inflicted their mid-life crises on the nation. If they inherited an old house they would purge it of such grotesqueries as high ceilings or fireplaces. If they were town planners they instigated ‘comprehensive redevelopments’, involving the building of car parks. If they were railwaymen, they thought Euston was beautiful, and they closed railway lines. From the rail enthusiasts’ point of view, the only thing that can be said for Marples is that, while he helped ruin Britain with his Darwinian notion of ‘the motorway of life’, he also did some small things to check the motorist: he introduced single and double yellow lines, parking meters, traffic wardens and the MOT test, hence the graffiti appearing along the length of the M1, which he had both opened at transport minister, and helped build as a businessman: ‘Marples must go’. He did go, in late 1975, and it still seems unjust that, when faced with an unpayable tax bill, arising from years of tax evasion, he should have been whisked away from justice by a train: the Night Ferry. From Paris, he entrained to Monte Carlo, where he died in 1978.
On the last night of the Night Ferry, the indicator on Platform 2 at Victoria read ‘Au Revoir Mon Ami’, and the driver waved a copy of the London Evening News, which died on the same day. There was a crescendo of whistles from the other locomotives as it sighingly left Victoria for the last time. One of the sleeper cars, number 3792, is preserved at the Shildon annexe of the National Railway Museum, so in the case of this vehicle at least, ‘au revoir’ was correct.
THE TRAIN FERRY PERFECTED
A month after speaking to Phil Marshall, I was on a plane approaching Copenhagen. I had discovered that while it costs about 300 pounds to fly from London to Malmö, it costs only thirty pounds to fly to Copenhagen, which might as well be a suburb of Malmö, since the opening of the Øresund Bridge, which connects the two cities, in 2000. As we began our descent, everybody looked left, and there was the Øresund Bridge. On the Danish side, the crossing of the Øresund strait begins with a tunnel before the bridge takes over, and cars appeared to rise out of the sea to traverse the bridge, like amphibian cars of the future, blithely taking everything in their stride.
The Øresund Bridge supplies the premise for the TV thriller The Bridge: a body is found exactly halfway along it, triggering bureaucratic complications that are apparently very compelling. I’ve never seen The Bridge, or the British spin-off, The Tunnel, which pedantically transfers the corpse to the middle of the Channel Tunnel. Before the building of the bridge, the Øresund strait was traversed by a train ferry, and it was in the Danish archipelago that the art of the train ferry was perfected.
According to Railway Wonders of the World, a British traveller to Copenhagen in the early 1930s would have proceeded as follows. He would begin by taking the ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg. There, in the evening, he would board a through sleeper carriage on a train for Copenhagen, which would have journeyed the fifty-five miles across Jutland to Fredericia. From there, the carriage would have been put on a train ferry for the two-mile crossing of the Little Belt. ‘By smart working,’ wrote the anonymous author, ‘the train is run on to the ferry steamer in fifteen or twenty minutes; the crossing itself takes fifteen to twenty minutes, and another fifteen minutes is needed at Strib to run the trains off on to land again and re-marshall.’ The train then ran across the island of Funen for fifty-two miles, bringing it to Nyborg, on the west side of the Great Belt, where the train was put onto another train ferry, which sailed for eighteen miles to Korsør on the eastern side of the Great Belt: a process that took nearly two hours. From Korsør, the train ran to Copenhagen.
From 1935, a bridge across the Little Belt replaced the Fredericia-Strib train ferry, which had been operating since 1872. In 1997, the Great Belt Fixed Link, combining bridges and a tunnel, m
ade redundant the train ferry from Nyborg to Korsør, which had begun in 1883.
The operation of a train ferry is a now a dying art. Whereas the British Night Ferry would have been thought of when it started as something akin to a boat, by the time it had ceased to run it would have looked like something akin to – but not as good as – an aeroplane. (There was a half-hour check-in for the service, although it wasn’t called that.)
Today, there are half a dozen freight-only train ferries operating in the Baltic. The Berlin Night Express is the only service marked on my European Railway Map with the line of blue dashes reserved for passenger train ferries, but this says more about the map than the facts of the case. A passenger train ferry runs from Rødby in Denmark to Puttgarden in Germany. It carries diesel trains from Copenhagen to Hamburg, but no longer at night. My map connects Rødby and Zealand with red dashes, to which the map key offers no clue. But written above the dashes is ‘2021’, which must denote the year in which an ‘immersed tunnel’ between these two places, the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link, is scheduled to be completed. What use this information is to the purchaser of the map in 2016 I don’t know. There is also a train ferry running from Villa San Giovanni in southern Italy to Messina in Sicily, for the trains running between Palermo and Naples. The Strait of Messina is only a couple of miles wide, and barely a millimetre on my map, so there probably wasn’t room to fit the line of blue dashes.
Night Trains Page 21
