A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  Once I had recovered my composure I was bombarded with questions. What on earth was I doing by myself boiling water on a wicker basket in a railway train? Who was I? And where was I going? To the last question I was unable to give a satisfactory reply. To a school, I answered, to a large school of over 100 boys. Had anyone a notion where such a school was to be found? Or at what station I ought to get out? My new friends were at first nonplussed. They suggested at length that my wisest course would be to disembark at the next stop, which was Hemel Hempstead, and put my implicit trust in the station master. He would no doubt eventually establish my identity and possibly my ultimate destination. I fell in with this sensible proposition.

  At Hemel Hempstead the train drew up. I got out, and my kind friends lowered the seven pieces of luggage, plus the picnic basket on to the platform. Before I had time to collect my wits and wave them goodbye, the train chugged off. I did not have long to look around. Suddenly a familiar voice screamed out my name, and there, running towards me was, of all people, my mother. To my surprise she was in a most extraordinary state of disorderliness and dirt. She had lost her hat, there were smuts on her face and hair, and her pretty dress was crumpled and covered with oil stains. My joy and relief were so great, however, that it never occurred to me to criticize her behaviour, which was at once explained in a breathless volley of excitement. On leaving the carriage at Euston she had failed to find a newspaper stall and, instead, had got into conversation with the engine driver, the most charming, the most sympathetic engine driver that ever was born. He had begged her to get into his cabin so that he might show her the most marvellous brass gadgets, all brightly polished and so clean you could see your reflection in them. Before she knew what was happening the whistle had blown and they were off. One of her life’s ambitions was now fulfilled. She knew I would understand and not mind. Had the station master seen? And if so, would he arrest her? How clever I had been to get out at Hemel Hempstead and not get carried on to Crewe, or wherever the next stop was. She was ravenous. Had I eaten all the sandwiches and drunk all the coffee?

  JAMES LEES-MILNE.

  Another Self

  THE EVERLASTING PERCY

  I used to be a fearful lad,

  The things I did were downright bad;

  And worst of all were what I done

  From seventeen to twenty-one

  On all the railways far and wide

  From sinfulness and shameful pride.

  For several years I was so wicked

  I used to go without a ticket,

  And travelled underneath the seat

  Down in the dust of people’s feet,

  Or else I sat as bold as brass

  And told them “Season,” in first-class.

  In 1921, at Harwich,

  I smoked in a non-smoking carriage;

  I never knew what Life nor Art meant,

  I wrote “Reserved” on my compartment,

  And once (I was a guilty man)

  I swopped the labels in guard’s van.

  From 1922 to 4.

  I leant against the carriage door

  Without a-looking at the latch;

  And once, a-leaving Colney Hatch,

  I put a huge and heavy parcel

  Which I were taking to Newcastle,

  Entirely filled with lumps of lead,

  Up on the rack above my head;

  And when it tumbled down, oh Lord!

  I pulled communication cord.

  The guard came round and said, “You mule!

  What have you done, you dirty fool?”

  I simply sat and smiled, and said

  “Is this train right for Holyhead?”

  He said “You blinking blasted swine,

  You’ll have to pay the five-pound fine.”

  I gave a false name and address,

  Puffed up with my vaingloriousness.

  At Bickershaw and Strood and Staines

  I’ve often got on moving trains,

  And once alit at Norwood West

  Before my coach had come to rest.

  A window and a lamp I broke

  At Chipping Sodbury and Stoke

  And worse I did at Wissendine:

  I threw out bottles on the line

  And other articles as be

  Likely to cause grave injury

  To persons working on the line—

  That’s what I did at Wissendine.

  I grew so careless what I’d do

  Throwing things out, and dangerous too,

  That, last and worst of all I’d done,

  I threw a great sultana bun

  Out of the train at Pontypridd—

  It hit a platelayer, it did,

  I thought that I should have to swing

  And never hear the sweet birds sing.

  The jury recommended mercy,

  And that’s how grace was given to Percy.

  E. V. KNOX

  Britain’s changing landscape. An early steam train approaches Bangor, North Wales.

  Lithograph by T. Picken

  THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS

  That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

  Not till about

  One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

  Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

  All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense

  Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

  Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

  Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence

  The river’s level drifting breadth began,

  Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

  All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

  For miles inland,

  A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

  Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

  Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

  A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

  And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

  Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

  Until the next town, new and nondescript,

  Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

  At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

  The weddings made

  Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys

  The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

  And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls

  I took for porters larking with the mails,

  And went on reading. Once we started, though,

  We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls

  In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,

  All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

  As if out on the end of an event

  Waving goodbye

  To something that survived it. Struck, I leant

  More promptly out next time, more curiously,

  And saw it all again in different terms:

  The fathers with broad belts under their suits

  And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;

  An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,

  The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,

  The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

  Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.

  Yes, from cafés

  And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed

  Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days

  Were coming to an end. All down the line

  Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

  The last confetti and advice were thrown,

  And, as we moved, each face seemed to define

  Just what it saw departing: children frowned

  At something dull; fathers had never known

  Success so huge and wholly farcical;

  The women shared

  The secret like a happy funeral;

  While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared

  At a religious wounding. Free at
last,

  And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

  We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.

  Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast

  Long shadows over major roads, and for

  Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

  Just long enough to settle hats and say

  I nearly died,

  A dozen marriages got under way.

  They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

  —An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,

  And someone running up to bowl—and none

  Thought of the others they would never meet

  Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

  I thought of London spread out in the sun,

  Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

  There we were aimed. And as we raced across

  Bright knots of rail

  Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss

  Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail

  Travelling coincidence; and what it held

  Stood ready to be loosed with all the power

  That being changed can give. We slowed again,

  And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

  A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower

  Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  *1 The above is no mere fiction. It occurred on one of the English railways some years ago, and the facts were communicated to a member of the writer’s family by the gentleman whose life was thus strangely perilled. It... may perhaps induce others to avoid a railway journey with only one strange fellow-traveller—RB.

  EUROPE

  The Orient Express

  1. Inaugural journey

  On the evening of 4 October 1883 a group of frock-coated gentlemen with revolvers in their pockets assembled on a platform of the Gare de l’Est in Paris.

  Attendants in buckled shoes, white stockings and dark-red velvet breeches and monkey-jackets took charge of their bags while they kissed their wives and children—“We did not part without a little nervousness,” noted one of them in his diary. And they boarded the polished mahogany coaches that gleamed under the new electric chandeliers.

  Relatives, friends and onlookers watched through the windows as the travellers installed themselves in their private salons, decorated in the style of Louis XIV, and gazed upon the tables in the restaurant car laid for dinner, with white damask cloths and intricately folded napkins, ornate silverware, hand-blown glasses, the ice buckets already containing champagne and the claret already decanted.

  The doors slammed shut. The band stopped playing. The top-hatted stationmaster drew himself to attention. The guard blew his whistle, the crowd gave a cheer and, with a sudden lurch, the train drew out of the station.

  As it steamed eastwards away from Paris, the passengers introduced themselves to one another—M. Boyer of Le Figaro to M. Opper de Blowitz of The Times, M. Olim, a member of the Belgian cabinet, to Missah Effendi, chief secretary of the Turkish Embassy to France, Dr. Harzé, the distinguished Parisian physician who was to care for the health of those on board, to General Falciano of Rumania, M. Edmund About, the Alsatian essayist, to M. Grimpel, a rising star of the French Ministry of Finance.

  In all they numbered two dozen, including an impeccably mannered Dutchman named Jansson, whose position in life and purpose on board nobody established, Herr von Scala, an Austro-Hungarian official who had breached etiquette by bringing his wife and sister-in-law along, and a watchful clique of bankers who had financed the venture.

  The leader of the group was M. Georges Nagelmackers, the young founder of the grandiosely named but still little-known Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et Grands Express Européens. The occasion was the first journey of the world’s first great international train. Nagelmackers’s Orient Express, which was to cross central Europe and the brigand-infested Balkans to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in eighty-two hours.

  “He is bent on revolutionizing Continental travelling,” Opper de Blowitz, then the doyen not only of the journalists on board but of foreign correspondents everywhere, reported to The Times, “by introducing a comfort and facility hitherto unknown, and has had to struggle for ten years not only against internal difficulties and the conflicting interests of railway companies, but against the indifference of the very portion of the public which is destined to profit from the result.” The ten years of “internal difficulties” to which Opper referred had included near-bankruptcy and an almost disastrous partnership with an American confidence-trickster. The “conflicting interests” that had opposed him had embroiled him in tortuous negotiations with ten different railway companies and as many governments.

  Mortgaged to the hilt though it was before it had even set out, the Orient Express was the result of a thoroughly novel idea, and an unquestioned triumph for Nagelmackers—a supranational train operated by an individual entrepreneur, running along track and pulled by locomotives belonging to others.

  However timorous his guests were at the prospect of being set down, eighty-two hours after their departure from Paris, in a strange and remote eastern city neither they nor many westerners had visited before, and of possibly being attacked on the way by bands of armed robbers (hence their revolvers), they were conscious of partaking in the history of travel. Indeed they were later to publish between them no less than six lengthy accounts of their journey.

  Having effected the introductions, everyone set to inspecting the hitherto-unknown comforts of the train that was to take them far beyond the frontiers of western civilization. It was as brand new in its conception as it was in its construction.

  There was a smoking room, a ladies’ boudoir and a library. The compartments, or coupés, were miniature drawing rooms with Turkish carpets on the floors, inlaid tables and two red plush armchairs apiece. At night the silk-covered walls folded down to reveal two copiously upholstered beds, transforming each coupé into an equally luxurious sleeping compartment.

  Christmas dinner on a European express, 1905

  Between each coupé was a mosaic-floored cabinet de toilette; and in a special coach at the rear of the train, where there were ice-boxes crammed with exotic foods and a servants’ dormitory, was a truly remarkable innovation—cubicles containing showers supplied with abundant hot and cold water.

  But it was not until the cry of “Messieurs les voyageurs, le diner est servi,” that the travellers saw M. Nagelmackers’s pièce de résistance. The Orient Express’s dining room had a ceiling covered with embossed leather from Cordoue, walls lined with tapestries from the Atelier des Gobelins, founded by the Sun King, and drapes of finest Gênes velvet.

  As for the five-course dinner cooked on board from entirely fresh materials by the vast, black-bearded Burgundian chef, Boyer wrote that he was “not merely of the first order but a man of genius—and my stomach protests such praise to be entirely inadequate.” After the meal the travellers applauded the chef and retired to the smoking room for cigars, whisky and soda and some hands of whist before going to bed.

  At speeds of forty miles an hour and more, the Orient Express raced across Europe, through Strasbourg, Vienna and Budapest, greeted at stations along the way by brass bands and local dignitaries. As they drew into Tsigany, in Hungary, a gypsy orchestra came on board, and serenaded them as far as the border. At the end of that dinner the chef emerged from his kitchen, his eyes, according to Opper, “ablaze with patriotic fervour,” and led everyone in a stirring rendering of La Marseillaise. Early the next morning they steamed into Bucharest.

  2. A royal engine driver

  Probably the train’s most famous and eccentric regular customer was King Boris of Bulgaria, who was a keen amateur engine driver and wore white overalls designed and made for him by his Parisian tailor. As long as he just stood in the cab, which he did for hours at a time, observing the professional driver at wor
k, all was well, and Nagelmackers was pleased to indulge him—he was, after all, the most frequent hirer of the train’s private carriage, which cost the equivalent of twenty first-class tickets. But then he began to pull monarchical rank, and to insist on taking over the controls himself. He was a devotee of speed and lacked a grasp of what signals meant. La Compagnie Internationale intervened, the King was firmly ordered to desist and drivers were told that the punishment for allowing him to enter the cab would be dismissal. Little daunted, Boris would sit in his private carriage until the train crossed the border into Bulgaria. Then he would alight, already garbed in his overalls, and defy anyone to stop him from driving a train across his own kingdom.

  MARTIN PAGE,

  Lost Pleasures of the Great Trains

  3. Lack of catering

  The Orient Express, once unique for its service, is now unique among trains for its lack of it. The Indian Rajdhani Express serves curries in its dining car, and so does the Pakistani Khyber Mail; the Meshed Express serves Iranian chicken kebab, and the train to Sapporo in Northern Japan smoked fish and glutinous rice. Box lunches are sold at the station in Rangoon, and Malaysian Railways always include a dining car that resembles a noodle stall, where you can buy mee-hoon soup; and Amtrak, which I had always thought to be the worst railway in the world, serves hamburgers on the James Whitcomb Riley (Washington–Chicago). Starvation takes the fun out of travel, and from this point of view the Orient Express is more inadequate than the poorest Madrasi train, where you exchange stained lunch coupons for a tin tray of vegetables and a quart of rice.