I'm also at a loose end. Not knowing what to do with myself, as it's impossible to read War and Peace after a couple of beers, I order a bottle of Great Wall of China red wine. This is partly out of curiosity and also because I fancy 'having a few' after the long journey.
Great Wall of China red wine is just about the worst wine I have ever tasted, although it gets steadily better after the first glass. The chef and the guards look my way approvingly as I make my way through the best part of the bottle. 'Great stuff, great stuff,' I'm muttering to myself as I make my way back to my cabin, after contemplating buying a souvenir bottle (but not being quite that far gone).
We arrive at Beijing station at 05:31. I feel rough.
On the platform a Chinese trainspotter is taking pictures of our train and seems in an excited mood. I'm not so lively, but this is the first chance I have had to speak to a real, live Chinese trainspotter.
I go over and ask him if he likes trains. It's pretty obvious he does, but I need to break the ice.
'I have a lot of train pictures,' he replies.
I enquire whether there are many Chinese trainspotters.
'Oh yes, very many,' he says.
His name is Yun Cheng and he is from Shanxi province, he tells me. 'Just a very little number of Chinese like trains as I do. But China has many people, so there are many train fans in China: 400,000. There are websites. Do you mind if I show you some pictures?'
Yun Cheng proceeds to flick through photographs of trains that he has stored on his phone.
'Do you want to know about Chinese railway?' he asks.
'Yes,' I reply.
'This is 25-G coach. This is 25-T coach. This is 18 coach, East Germany,' Yun Cheng says, pointing at my train. I have little idea what he's talking about. The locomotive belongs to China Railway, I learn, and dates from 2015. It's brand new and runs on electricity.
Another train enters the station. Yun Cheng's ears seem to prick up. 'The ZI57 express from Taizhou to Beijing!' he says. 'The ZI57 express from Taizhou!'
He rushes off to see the ZI57 express from Taizhou, his camera bag bouncing crazily as he goes – just as double-anorak's had back in Crewe on the dash to platform one to see the number-37 freight locomotives. Trainspotters: they're the same all over the world.
I leave him to it and head up a ramp to Beijing railway station, thinking how strange it is that I was here just a few months ago.
The travel writer Eric Newby described the Trans-Siberian Railway as 'the big red train ride' and it is just that. Big, long, with red carriages, and hard to get your head round. Somehow I've reached the capital of China from Europe without leaving the ground.
It is an odd sensation. Yet this might one day be small beer for trains.
A scheme has been mooted to link Moscow with Alaska by rail, via the remote city of Yakutsk and a tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. This would in theory open up the possibility of travelling by train from London to New York, a truly mammoth journey of around 13,000 miles taking a fortnight. Engineers have considered the viability of a 65-mile East-meets-West tunnel between Big Diomede and Little Diomede Islands beneath the famous stretch of sea. This is twice the length of the Channel Tunnel and would not prove technically challenging, engineers say. In 2011, delegates at a conference in Yakutsk met to discuss the potential project, which some estimated would cost £60 billion with a completion date of 2030. Keen to bolster the local economy, a leading politician in Russia's north-east gave the tunnel his blessing. Times, of course, have changed somewhat since then. Deteriorating relations between the White House and the Kremlin make the idea, which Nicholas II dreamed of as long ago as 1905, seem fanciful. But what a train journey that would have been – and perhaps still could be…
For me, however, another big country, with another big ride, awaits.
Oh yes, and I never did quite finish War and Peace.
8
AUSTRALIA: MUTINY ON THE INDIAN PACIFIC
IT'S A SUN-DRENCHED morning at East Perth terminal and the Indian Pacific gleams brightly beyond the long, cool shadows of the station. Two dozen stainless steel carriages stretch along the slowly bending, boomerang-shaped platform. Light plays on ridges of steel and the indented old panels of the crosscontinental train.
Little rectangles of metal riveted by doorways explain that our coaches date from the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were built in New South Wales by Commonwealth Engineering – which, it is explained, received a licence for the sleek bullet-like design from Budd, a metal fabricating company based in Philadelphia. The oldest carriage I can find is from 1967.
I've long ago learnt to seek out such details. Checking them out has almost become second nature. How old is this train? Where does it come from? How fast can this thing go? These, and other such queries, are the nuts and bolts of rail enthusiasm – and as easy as it may be to mock having an interest in these 'train facts', as I might have in the past, they do somehow add to the sense of journey.
Call me a trainspotter, if you like, though I don't think I've reached that stage quite yet.
Luckily, John Brinkley, one of three train managers for this Indian Pacific service – so named as it travels from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean – is on hand to answer questions. He's a rotund man with a twinkle in his eyes, and looks as though he could have been a decent rugby prop forward in his day. He's welcoming guests on the platform and pointing them towards their correct carriages, and class of travel, for our three-night journey to Sydney. We are departing on a Sunday at 11:55, arriving on the east coast in four days' time, where we will pull into Sydney Central station on Wednesday at 11:07.
Those are the basics, but Brinkley goes on to say that the locomotive is an NR-19 with 4,000 horsepower, a top speed of 115 kmph and an average speed of 89 kmph. The journey will take about 65 hours with five scheduled stops, during which water and supplies are to be taken on and brief local tours are arranged for passengers. As well as the 24 carriages and locomotive, there are two 'power vans' (to give the loco a boost when required), a luggage van, and three motor-rail trailers carrying cars at the back. This train has three classes: platinum (extremely well appointed, with double beds and a swanky dining carriage with a free cocktail bar), gold (sleeper cabins and a lounge with free booze, plus free meals in a smart dining carriage), and red (the lowest class, effectively 'economy', with reclining seats and a cafe where you have to pay). I am travelling in gold for two nights followed by a night in red. The train is precisely 567 metres long and weighs 1,087.3 tonnes. Brinkley tells me that the carriages have a 'ribbed, late art deco' style.
It's not often that you find train managers who are quite so well informed. I ask Brinkley if the free drink on board in gold and platinum ever leads to any trouble. Brinkley raises an eyebrow. 'Yes, we'll call police to remove guests, if they're boisterous or threatening,' he says. 'Intoxication. Stuff in their cabins. That happens.' By 'stuff', I take it he means private stashes of liquor. Smoking is banned, although once, Brinkley says, 'a gentleman even lit up in front of me.' He pauses as if to suggest that was a very stupid idea indeed – which it was. 'The police took him away.' He pauses again, holding back his punch line for effect. 'You could say he was a smoker to the end.'
Brinkley tells me that the train hit a camel on the way from Sydney to Perth a couple of days ago: 'Damage to the loco – we had to repair an air pipe. We blow silent animal whistles and the horn, but it still happens. Kangaroos keep out of the way, generally. Kangaroos are pretty smart.' I'm keen to see one, I say. 'Your best bet is around dusk, mate,' replies Brinkley, who tells me he worked for the Royal Australian Navy for 22 years before joining Great Southern Rail, which runs the Indian Pacific, 16 years ago.
He points me in the direction of gold class, tells me to 'enjoy the journey, mate' and begins talking to another passenger, who I gather is an off-duty train driver from Sydney on his fifth trip on the Indian Pacific. 'Each journey is completely different: the feel of the carriages on the track,' say
s Troy, when I get a chance to ask him. 'Being a driver, I can tell: each train is unique in itself.'
'In what way?'
'It's just the feel, mate; I can't explain. Then there's the country: oh wow, the expanse! It's the only way to see Australia: down by the tracks. You just don't get that at 30,000 feet, mate.'
And off he skips, like true train lovers all over the world, to take a picture of the shiny loco at the front.
'He's going to say he met all these stupid Aussies'
Perth to Kalgoorlie
Booze, fags, camels, kangaroos, top speeds and the 'feel of the track' covered, I board the Indian Pacific in a gold-class carriage fitted with single cabins. A corridor snakes along the middle, allowing each cabin an L-shape with a clever stainless-steel pulldown sink in a corner.
The 'hospitality attendant' for the carriage, Ryan, who is on his third journey in his new job, tells me there is no Wi-Fi. 'It's good to get away from all that,' he says. Which I suppose it is.
I settle into one of the two comfortable blue seats facing one another in my cabin. These are to be converted into a bed later by Ryan during 'bed service' while we are at dinner.
An Australian woman in one of the single cabins has a complaint. 'I feel a little claustrophobic. Can I upgrade?' she asks, sounding panicky.
Ryan: 'I'm afraid the train is fully booked.'
The lady: 'It's just the pictures on the website were different.'
A conversation ensues with 'on the website it was different' being repeated several times, to no avail. Ryan rides it out. The cabins are quite small, though they are a cut above most, if not as spacious as those on the Istanbul–Tehran train. I'm quite content.
We still haven't moved off. I put my feet up and read a map, provided by the pull-out table, which says that Aboriginal people who encountered the early steam train at Ooldea considered it to be a great white snake, carrying wicked spirits. And who could blame them, after many millennia without large metallic objects billowing trails of steam in their remote land. The first rail link between east and west, I read, was opened in 1917 (requiring several changes of train). Part of the impetus behind the construction of the line was, according to a loudspeaker message as we pull away, to allow the movement of troops. Over many years there had been a 'fear of Russian invasion', although the strength of that fear had ebbed and flowed depending on world events. Nervousness about Russian ships calling in with guns at Sydney and Melbourne dated back as far as the Crimean War, when the British outpost of Australia might have been vulnerable to attack by sea. Fortifications were bolstered in most major ports. It wasn't just the Japanese who were twitchy about Russian imperialism back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I go to seek out Ryan to ask about lunch and find him by a cabin where a giant man – another prop-forward type – is crammed on one of the blue seats, looking disgruntled. His name is Dave and he's an Aussie retiree who used to work in the civil service in Canberra. He wears a toad-like expression that seems to suggest: I'm going to have to sleep in this for three nights. He does not appear amused.
Ryan points Dave and me in the direction of the dining carriage. We weave along narrow corridors as the Indian Pacific chugs through the eastern edge of the capital of Western Australia, with its Thai restaurants, vintage-clothes shops and houses with solar panels. Walls facing the rails are covered in graffiti that begins charmingly, if a little bossily, LOVE YOUR CHILDREN MORE THAN YOU, continues with an unlikely, but well-minded WE MUST OUTLAW WAR, and moves on to the rather less charitable and blunt HATE YOUR EX. Cluster-bomb clouds are scattered in a royal-blue sky. Gum trees with peeling bark and drooping limbs line the track. We clatter across a green metal bridge.
No messing about, Dave and I go for a (free) beer in the lounge. We order Crown Lagers – 'Australia's finest' – and sit in the most prominent seats by the bar. We've beaten everyone else to it and are rather pleased with ourselves. Dave can only just fit in the burgundy leather chair and he leans forward, telling me about Chinese investors who are buying property in Sydney, pushing up house prices, and taking over 'all the coal mines in Hunter Valley'.
Others join us, but we are soon called to the elegant dining carriage, where a waiter seats Dave and me opposite an elderly couple named Joe and June. We're in wine-red booths, which are separated by frosted-glass partitions cut with a swirly pattern. Walls are clad in tan-coloured wood and there are shiny brass fittings. Joe (bald and with a tendency to poke a finger when making a point) and June (in a navy cardigan and tinted prescription glasses) are retired, too. He's a former carpenter and she was 'one of the first front-of-house barmaids in Adelaide, drove taxis, sold real estate, and did the jobs to fit in with children; you didn't have childcare in those days, you married young and you just got on with things; life was difficult but it was good, you didn't have to do training, you learnt on the job'.
All of this is communicated almost immediately. June also tells me that she's 'never been overseas; there's nowhere I want to go'. Joe, meanwhile, says, 'You're going to get beaten again: very badly.' He's talking about cricket. England and the Aussies are about to play in a crunch Ashes series.
Large (free) glasses of wine are poured. 'Artisan bread rolls' are consumed – these are deemed the starter – followed by a main course of jewfish served with 'bok choi and coconut rice'.
Joe to Dave: 'Do you like the fish?'
Dave to Joe: 'Not really.'
Joe to Dave: 'No flavour.'
Dave to Joe: 'Pretty bland.'
I quite like it after all the tasty but a tad repetitive borscht on the Trans-Siberian a couple of weeks back; I'm on a veritable charge of trips now. The final course consists of either strawberry panna cotta with 'strawberry coulis and fairy floss' (cotton candy), or cheddar cheese with glazed figs, strawberries and almonds. After hunks of dark-brown bread and chunks of meat on the outskirts of Omsk, panna cotta, glazed figs and bok choi seem positively exotic.
Dave tells us that he loves trains and has been from Singapore to Bangkok on the Eastern and Oriental Express in Pullman class. He, Joe and June are all train fans, they say. Then Dave hauls himself up. 'I'm going to bide my leave, I'm just about cut in half here,' he says. The table is pushing into his substantial midriff. This is the only meal Dave eats in the dining carriage. The rest are served to him, and two others who join him for the same reason, at one of the drinking lounge's larger sofa-booths that understanding waiters especially set up with cutlery and crockery. I don't think it's the first time such emergency measures have had to be taken.
Dave departs, stage left (in the direction of the bar).
June tells me about a recent trip she and Joe took on The Ghan, the train from Adelaide in the south of Australia via Alice Springs – the nearest station to the famous monolithic rock formation of Uluru (or Ayer's Rock) – to Darwin on the north coast. Ghan is a shortening of The Afghan Express and is named after Afghan camel crews who helped explore Australia's interior during the nineteenth century. I had been tempted to take The Ghan, which has been running on standard gauge between Alice Springs and Darwin since 2004; previously it only went from Adelaide to Alice Springs on an unreliable service (with the tracks disused after the new Ghan began). But something about travelling across the entire breadth of the continent on the Indian Pacific appealed to me. Besides, The Ghan seems to crop up repeatedly in travel magazines. I wanted to go on a less obvious journey… and meet Australians, not holidaymakers in search of a big red rock.
This strategy seems to be more than working.
'Flying is boring,' says June, though she is not impressed by the sleeping arrangements on the Indian Pacific. 'We had to book two single cabins as we couldn't climb on to a bunk. They're not catering properly for the elderly generation and we're the ones spending and travelling.' She takes a sip of wine.
And just as I'm thinking it's a bit rich that Australians complain about 'whingeing Poms', she puts my thoughts in order. Joe has gone to the toilet. She
leans forward and whispers, 'This is our last trip. My husband is dying of lung cancer.'
I say that I'm sorry to hear this, forgetting all about 'whingeing Aussies'. It's a fair comment, I suppose, that the bunk cabins are not especially comfortable for the elderly, who make up the mainstay of those travelling in gold class, at least on my journey. Joe and June are having to pay extra for the two single cabins and are not even together on their 'last trip'.
Joe returns and looks thoughtful. 'It's like the moon,' says Joe. 'No trees.' He's gazing out of the window at the now wide-open landscape. Shrubs and rust-red soil disappear into infinity under the deep blue sky. 'Nullarbor: no trees. Like the moon. You've got to see the Nullarbor before you die.'
We have not yet reached the much-feted Nullarbor Plain, which is further east and is where we will traverse the world's longest straight stretch of railway track: 297 miles of it. Already though, the scenery is wild and rugged: the harshest and least forgivinglooking of any on these rides. There's not a kangaroo, nor any other sign of life, in sight.
Ticket to Ride Page 19
