Ticket to Ride

by Tom Chesshyre

  We spent a day in Pristina before this ride, visiting an old steam engine (much photographed), the main square with its sad digital screen displaying the faces of those who died in the 1998–99 Kosovo War, an excellent little ethnological museum, and the capital's statue of Bill Clinton, who is highly regarded locally for sanctioning NATO action against the Serbs during the war. The statue is on Bill Clinton Boulevard. During this period of sightseeing, I got to know my new companions, and realised something almost from the start. There is a clear, though unofficial, pecking order among rail enthusiasts, a hierarchy based on railway knowledge: rail cred, if you like.

  At the top of the tree is Colin Boocock, a silver-haired 'railway photographer and author' from Derby (he gives me his card), who is on this inaugural Kosovo–Albania trip with his wife Mary. There are a few couples on the break but most of the party consists of men travelling alone, as well as a couple of single women. Boocock seems to have semi-legendary status and is regarded as a fount of all train knowledge. A few years back he and Mary completed a round-the-world train trip. Before retiring to become a railway photographer and author, Boocock worked as a train maintenance engineer for British Rail and Railtrack, which ran the rail infrastructure in Britain from 1994 to 2002 after British Rail was privatised. He is such a train authority that there is an air of mystique surrounding him.

  There are several other railway philosopher kings among our number, including those who wear their train knowledge lightly, such as Johnnie and Nick (who refers to himself as a 'self-employed train historian'), and two slightly secretive rail enthusiasts who take their trainspotting so seriously that they shun all cultural excursions, and conversation with others, in favour of taking an extra train or tram ride on the side, whenever possible. Among the best natured of the philosopher kings is Mike Steadman, a contributor to Railway Herald magazine who is travelling with his wife Wendy. Steadman is a 'semi-retired energy broker' from Hereford, with a bumbling, bombastic style and a bit of a belly, upon which a camera hanging from his neck always rests.

  'Train photography is my forte. I've been published' are almost his first words to me. We are chugging along through Kosovan hills, passing the husks of burnt-out old stations that were destroyed during the civil war and are yet to be repaired. Some of the stations are still in service and used as points at which passengers are dropped off; a process that involves leaping from the train onto the dirt terrain by the tracks. The lack of building repair is down to the poor economy of Kosovo, which has been struggling in the wake of the destructive war that led to its declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008. This nationhood is still not recognised by Serbia, which lies just to the north of the tiny new country, the youngest in Europe (about the size of Devon).

  I am not surprised to learn that Steadman has been to Crewe station 'many times'. He is quick to take on the role of trainspotter spokesman. 'We get a bad press, regularly,' he says, as we trundle along. 'But we're fair game for it. People can say what they want.'

  He has a purist's approach to trainspotting: 'I don't want the Orient Express or the luxury Pullmans. I'm at the opposite end of the scale: rough and ready.'

  Steadman says he has recently been on a train trip in Eritrea as well as Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Bosnia. 'Most of the time Wendy doesn't come. She says: "You go and I'll take control of the TV zapper." I don't collect train numbers like some people do. I just take photographs. I must have taken hundreds of thousands.' He checks his camera. 'In the past two days I've taken one thousand three hundred and eighty. I'm click-happy. I'll make no bones about it.'

  Steadman pauses to take a few pictures of an old rusting train wagon, partially covered by weeds on the edge of the track. 'All those wagons there, they've had their axle boxes removed,' he says, adding that the metal from the axle boxes is taken for scrap.

  The locomotive on our train is Norwegian, Steadman continues, and dates from 1961 (the legendary Boocock later tells us by way of clarification that, although it was in use in Norway, it was made in Sweden); the coaches are second-class Austrian carriages from a later period; a sign on the wall says: NICHT RESERVIERT. Such details are the meat and drink of rail enthusiasm, as I have so quickly discovered.

  'In some foreign countries the locals cannot believe that people want to go down obscure branch lines or visit the depot,' Steadman says. 'I appreciate this is a niche market, but it exists.'

  We pass through a tunnel and the carriage, which is unlit, goes pitch black. We exit and, totally contradicting what he said earlier, Steadman says that one of his favourite recent train journeys was in an opulent Pullman carriage travelling from Crewe to the Kyle of Lochalsh in Scotland. The Kyle of Lochalsh is another of my future destinations.

  Steadman says, 'Five hundred pounds for a weekend. That's what it cost, and that's what I go to work for.'

  Wendy, who has been silent up to now, but who has appeared more than content that her husband has someone who is willing to listen to him, says to me, 'You're not getting bored, are you? Once he gets going he's hard to stop.'

  Steadman ignores this and turns to take a few snaps of another burnt-out station through the little top window. We are passing the village of Zllakuqan, which has a white church at its centre and high mountains rising beyond. These are the foothills of the Albanian Alps, also known as the 'Accursed Mountains', a nickname that seems well chosen judging by the jagged snowcapped peaks. The church, our local guide Ilir tells us, is Catholic. The religious make-up of Kosovo is both complicated and controversial. During the civil war more than a million mainly Muslim ethnic Albanians were forced to flee by the Serbian Orthodox army. Most were taken in packed railway carriages on a track leading to Macedonia in the south, which we are to travel along in a couple of days. The majority returned following the defeat of the Serbs, many of whom have in turn left the country for fear of reprisals (more than 200,000, it is believed, leaving about 40,000). Yet although Kosovo is now 95 per cent Muslim, a small number of the ethnic Albanian population is Catholic, making up about two per cent of the country. So Zllakuqan is both an oddity and a talking point. Were we not on the 16:30 from Pristina to Peja it is unlikely that any of us would have ever laid eyes on the village.

  We pause near Zllakuqan to let an elderly man jump off. He is clutching a bucket. There is seemingly no station to speak of. He shuffles in the direction of a tractor in a field dotted with dark brown cows. In the carriage ahead, where locals are sitting, children are dangling their legs from the train's open door. It feels strange to be isolated from them in our own private carriage, but Alan explains that this was the best way of ensuring that the group had guaranteed seats.

  Soft golden sunlight flickers on the surface of a meandering river as we move closer to the Accursed Mountains. We are in a quiet valley. More snow-capped peaks emerge to the north-west in the direction of Montenegro. We pass a few simple stone dwellings where local children give us the finger and shake their fists. The kids dangling their legs out of the train yell something at them and shake their fists and give them the finger back. This exchange of pleasantries is conducted with smiles on faces. It's just bravado; they don't really mean it (as far as I can tell). The smell of smoke from a bonfire wafts through the windows. The wheels of the train rat-tat-tat on the track.

  In the run-up to Peja, I venture into the carriage with the locals. It's packed: standing room only. I ask two teenagers crammed by the door what they make of the tourist carriage attached to their usual train.

  'I never saw a train lover before,' one of the girls says.

  Her friend chuckles, and eyeballs me. So soon into my wanderings by rail, I seem to have achieved 'train lover' status – in the eyes of two Kosovan teenagers at least.

  An earnest man wearing a checked shirt overhears this and says, 'You are good for value: we need tourists.'

  His neighbour says, 'Actually a lot of Kosovans love trains as they are very comfortable.'

  'Do you take pictures and days off to see t
rains as a hobby?' I ask.

  'Hmm,' he says. 'Hmm.'

  The earnest man in the checked shirt says, 'Maybe that is a crazy… I don't know.'

  I think he is being polite. Having survived the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and with a fledgling peace in place, perhaps it's more than understandable that travelling by train is simply a matter of getting from A to B, ideally in un-cramped conditions (though that's not the case today). There are more important concerns than taking pictures of locomotives in a country with an average annual income of about £3,600 and a northerly neighbour that says that Kosovo is a province that belongs to them. On a recent visit to Albania, Serbia's prime minister Aleksandar Vučić declared: 'Kosovo is part of Serbia and always will be.' Vučić was formerly a member of the Serbian Radical Party and during the civil war threatened that 100 Muslims would be killed for every single Serb in Bosnia, though he has since rebranded himself as a moderniser who wishes to attain membership of the European Union.

  Our 1961 Swedish-built loco chugs along as I think about Kosovo's predicaments. The country clearly has a lot on its plate. We skirt a brewery and a five-a-side pitch where kids are playing and men are sitting on a fence drinking beer. Then we pull into Peja. It is 18:32. The driver blasts the horn and we disembark onto the tracks. There is no platform. Children are running about on the rails; a few had chased alongside the train as it arrived. Many pictures are taken of Peja station. It's in a natural amphitheatre, surrounded by the Accursed Mountains, and makes for a few good shots.

  Taking a train is obviously not just about what you see and do on board. In these tales from the track, I intend to convey a flavour of some of the places visited along the way, their history and current affairs. It's not all about the trains. They do, after all, take you somewhere – often well off the beaten tourist trail. Yet given that my main aim is to understand our affection for train travel, I'm adopting a snapshot approach. I take the train, take the pulse and move on: no hanging about.

  This first stop-off has plenty of interest. Peja is a tranquil city with a population of 60,000, a gurgling river, a market selling fake Hugo Boss jackets and Rolex watches, a handful of mosques, a statue of Mother Teresa (who hails from these parts), an inordinate number of cafes serving strong coffees for 50 cents (the currency is the euro), and a street named after Tony Blair.

  Like Bill Clinton, Blair is revered for the part he played in allowing NATO strikes against the Serbs in the recent war. In the market, I meet a second-hand bookseller with a stall (next to another stall selling plastic guns for kids). He says, 'Oh yes, we like your Tony Blair. I hear that in your country you don't like him because he lie about the war in Iraq.' Others I encounter are of a similar point of view. It's intriguing to be somewhere where the former British prime minister – who has fallen from grace in so many people's eyes – is quite so revered.

  Yet the reverence makes sense when you consider NATO's role in the country's recent history. Were it not for NATO, Peja would probably be referred to on our tour as Pec (the preferred Serbian name), Kosovo might not exist as a nation in its own right, and Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia who died while on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, might have clung on to power and enforced the mass displacement of ethnic Albanians. The very architecture of Peja bears witness to the days of this key struggle to 'save' Kosovo. The city was badly damaged during the height of the conflict, resulting in the uninspiring modern buildings that pervade. There are, however, a few elegant remaining Ottoman-era kullas (houses with fortified towers).

  Another local point of note is that Peja is home to the 'most beautiful women in Kosovo', according to my guidebook. And it's hard not to notice the striking local look: blonde hair (perhaps from a bottle), perfect poises, supermodel height, good fashion sense. No wonder one of the features of the market is its many wedding dresses laid out for inspection on a central square. There's a feeling of romance in the air. A lot of posing goes on, both among the women and the men, whose style tends towards tight T-shirts over bulging muscles, although there is nothing romantic about the queues of not-so-showy men on a street near the railway station, hoping to be picked up by construction bosses for casual work.

  Our hotel is close to Tony Blair Street. Our train enthusiast group is staying in smart, compact rooms; there are no complaints. We dine at an American-style restaurant with a view of the Lumbardhi river. And in the morning we are taken by bus to a Serbian Orthodox monastery overseen by 25 nuns, and to the dome-topped Visoki Dečani Monastery with its fine onyx and purple-marble facade, also Serbian Orthodox, run by monks. Both date from the Middle Ages. The frescoes of saints are haunting: ghost-like apparitions in vivid reds, greens and blues that have somehow survived the centuries – and recent troubles.

  One of the group nudges me and whispers in a Sid James voice, 'I know someone who used to be a monk. Trained, he did, but decided that he liked women too much. He married the woman next door and became an accountant.' He has a good cackle about this.

  Trainspotters can have a dry sense of humour.

  To understand the tensions between the remaining Serb population and the Islamic Albanian majority, you need only to experience the extreme security at these monasteries (there is no word for 'nunnery' in Kosovo; what others might call a nunnery is a 'monastery' that's home to nuns). At Visoki Dečani, Italian troops representing KFOR, the Kosovo Force operated by NATO to keep the peace, man a roadblock and a barbedwire fence surrounds the UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2004 an Albanian mob attacked the monastery, hurling Molotov cocktails at its ancient walls. Soldiers were brought in to prevent repeat violence.

  'Ghastly plasticky shoulder bags from the 1980s. Anoraks. Scruffy trainers'

  Peja to Pristina, Kosovo

  Peja is a diversion. We are soon returning eastwards to Pristina, before hitting the track south to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia.

  On the train to Pristina, I make the acquaintance of Charlie Halliwell, a 63-year-old retired librarian from Islington in north London. She has been interested in railways for 30 years and has travelled the world, going as far as Australia to take The Ghan, a famous train that connects Adelaide in the south of the country to Darwin in the far north. She's been to 50 countries on train holidays, including India, Jordan, Syria and Canada. Charlie has short grey hair brushed to one side, an impish smile, glasses hanging from a cord round her neck and a scattergun style of conversation that makes keeping up difficult. She admits, early on, to being a 'high-energy person'. She has also, inadvertently, become an aficionado of rail enthusiasm through her own love of trains and train travel.

  'Gricers!' she says, and looks at me to see if I recognise the word.

  I don't.

  'Gricers!' she continues. 'You can spot a gricer a mile away: ghastly plasticky shoulder bags from the 1980s. Anoraks. Scruffy trainers. They look a bit unloved. A fair number live alone. If they have a wife, they're a bit smarter. Generally, they look as though their minds are on other things.'

  'Trains,' I suggest.

  She ignores me; she's in full flow, speeding along like a locomotive without brakes as she proceeds to deliver a super-fast briefing on Rail Enthusiasts: An Insider's Guide from Someone Who Has Learnt to Put up with the More-Extreme-End-of-the-Spectrum Train Lovers (and Likes Them All Really).

  'I don't care if I get yelled at if I get in the way of one of their pictures.' She's talking about when she's on the train poking her camera out of the window as the carriage curves round a bend. This is the classic moment for a shot of the carriages ahead or behind – and perfectly normal non-gricer rail-enthusiast behaviour. The people yelling at her would be the aforementioned gricers. 'No, I don't care. It would be nice if people would ask more nicely. I don't really mind being asked to move. I have no sensitivity.'

  Charlie sighs and looks down the carriage as a couple of gricer types wobble along the aisle. Their cameras and camera bags seem almost to have become attached to their bodies, as
though they never part company. Do they take them off at night? They are wearing faded sun hats similar to those favoured by cricketers, although the rims have flopped down. Their shirts are partially untucked and they have very sensible walking shoes that have never been – and will never under any circumstances be – considered fashionable. Their shorts are of the cargo variety, a couple of sizes too big and with plenty of pockets (perhaps for notebooks). They do not conform precisely to Charlie's just-given definition of 'gricer' but a definite air of 'gricer' accompanies them. Charlie gives me a here are two classic examples look, then smiles at them, and they smile back. Polite gricers.

  Charlie tells me that she estimates that about five per cent of rail enthusiasts of the sort that might turn up at Crewe's platform five are women. I ask her why it's such a male-dominated hobby.

  'It just is,' she says. 'All of my friends tend to be men who like trains. The sounds, the smells, as well as the swinging, the rocking, the movement, that's what it's about. Men regress to being little children. I'm a psychologist; I have a degree in psychology. I like to see the bigger picture. To withhold information, they say, is a crime. Knowledge is power.'

  Charlie, I'm noticing, is not one to withhold information.