PRAISE FOR TICKET TO RIDE
'Trains, dry wit, more trains, evocative descriptions, more trains, fascinating people and more trains – what is there not to like?'
Christian Wolmar
'Funny and illuminating from Crewe to Korea, Ticket to Ride is a hugely entertaining account of the author's travels on the rails the world over – chance encounters fly like sparks'
Sara Wheeler
'Like mini-odysseys, Chesshyre's railway journeys are by turns gentle and awesome, and full of surprises'
John Gimlette
'Tom's ticket certainly scores all the best rides: fast rides and slow ones, short trips and long ones. But most important are the names: why would any trainspotter (let alone a gricer) pass up the Reunification Express or, even better the Orient Express, for a mere airplane?'
Tony Wheeler
PRAISE FOR TALES FROM THE FAST TRAINS
'Compulsory reading'
Mark Smith, THE MAN IN SEAT 61
'Great fun, and an exhilarating read'
Sara Wheeler
'If you've "done" Paris and Bruges and are wondering, "Where next?", then this may be a quiet revelation'
Andrew Marr
'Splendid twenty-first-century railway adventure. At last this IS the age of the train'
Simon Calder, THE INDEPENDENT
'Chesshyre… is an interesting, knowledgeable, discerning tour guide and a most genial companion'
Alexander Frater, author of Tales from the Torrid Zone
'Transforms seemingly unsurprising familiar territory – whether the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras or the cities of Frankfurt and Antwerp – into the stage for insights and adventures'
Dea Birkett, author of Serpent in Paradise
PRAISE FOR TO HULL AND BACK
'Tom Chesshyre celebrates the UK… discovering pleasure in the unregarded wonders of the "unfashionable underbelly" of Britain. The moral, of course, is that heaven is where you find it'
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
'You warm to Chesshyre, whose cultural references intelligently inform his postcards from locations less travelled'
THE TIMES
PRAISE FOR HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
'Highly readable Bill Bryson-esque travel writing'
Clover Stroud, THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'A hilarious record of a low-cost odyssey around the least salubrious corners of Europe'
Celia Brayfield, THE TIMES
PRAISE FOR A TOURIST IN THE ARAB SPRING
'This witty, perceptive book provides a fascinating read for lovers of thoughtful, imaginative and well-written travel literature'
Frank Barrett, THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
'A charming travel companion, entertaining and engaging'
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
TICKET TO RIDE
Copyright © Tom Chesshyre, 2016
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
Tom Chesshyre has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
eISBN: 978-1-78372-811-4
Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Summersdale books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organisations. For details contact Nicky Douglas by telephone: +44 (0) 1243 756902, fax: +44 (0) 1243 786300 or email: nicky@summersdale.com.
For all train lovers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Chesshyre's train travels include an 11,000-mile journey around Europe for his book on the European high-speed train revolution, and thousands of miles more across the UK for his weekly hotel column in The Times. He lives in London, and has visited almost 100 countries for his writing.
Tom is the author of How Low Can You Go?: Round Europe for 1p Each Way (Plus Tax), To Hull and Back: On Holiday in Unsung Britain, Tales from the Fast Trains: Europe at 186 mph, A Tourist in the Arab Spring and Gatecrashing Paradise: Misadventures in the Real Maldives.
www.tomchesshyre.co.uk
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Crewe Station, England: 'I'd go anywhere for a 37'
Chapter Two
Kosovo and Macedonia: 'You can spot a gricer a mile away'
Chapter Three
China: Fast noodles and revolutions
Chapter Four
India: Taking the toy train
Chapter Five
Sri Lanka: On the Reunification Express
Chapter Six
Turkey and Iran: 'We heartily welcome honourable tourists'
Chapter Seven
Finland, Russia and China: The big red train ride
Chapter Eight
Australia: Mutiny on the Indian Pacific
Chapter Nine
America: Trains, planes and automobiles (mainly trains)
Chapter Ten
Bordeaux, France: Fast train coming
Chapter Eleven
China; North Korea; Italy to Poland; Peru; Spain; Switzerland to Italy; Poland, Kaliningrad and Lithuania: Trains, trains, trains
Chapter Twelve
Inverness to Kyle of Lochalsh and Mallaig to Glasgow, Scotland; Kent and East Sussex, England: For the love of trains
Afterword
Acknowledgements
Trains Taken
Bibliography
The time indicated on the timetable is not the time at which the train will leave; it is the time before which the train will definitely not leave
Sign at Agra station, India
Look at that: a 1953 EA! WOOO-HOOO! Oh yeah, listen to that bell! Yeah, listen to that bell! Oh my God! WOOO-HOOO! She's so beautiful! All right!
Rail enthusiast in North Creek, New York
1
CREWE STATION, ENGLAND: 'I'D GO ANYWHERE FOR A 37'
IT'S AN OVERCAST day at the end of platform five of Crewe railway station. An icy wind whips across the tracks, rattling a spiky metal fence. Every now and then, a train clatters past. The rails crackle and hiss, rumble and groan.
Time ticks slowly during a lull. A sleek cherry-red train adorned with the message ARRIVE AWESOME emerges beneath the leaden north-west English sky. It's the 17:05 Virgin service to Manchester. This event draws the attention of my companions. 'Pendolino', says one of the group. He's wearing a woolly hat, heavy-framed glasses and an ill-fitting black jacket. A flask of tea pokes out of his rucksack and a camera is looped round his neck. He does not raise his camera. 'Sardine can', he says dismissively.
'Dog box', says his friend, a giant figure in his early twenties (I'd guess) with ginger hair. He carries an old-fashioned shoulder bag and is peering through Buddy-Holly-style glasses. The way the giant says 'dog box' suggests this is not a term of endearment. 'A Pendolino, class 153,' he adds.
The first man says, 'Awful thing.'
The giant says, 'Ah, they drag.'
I am not sure what he means by this, but it does not sound complimentary either. The train moves onwards to Manchester. Silence resumes.
I ask the giant how tall he is, learning that he is 7 feet 4 inches and so good at basketball that he may join an American college team. 'When I get the ball, I just put it in the net: whoom!' he tells me. Not many trainspotters at the end of platform five at Crewe station over the years can have been able to claim that.
'The 422 was on the Nantwich line earlier,' says a tiny elderly man wearing two anoraks (yes, two) and a woolly hat. He glances up at the giant, who seems to be the group's leading train authority.
The giant corrects him: 'It was a 37422, with a 68001. A DRS.'
'Ahhhh,' says the tiny elderly man.
I ask the giant what DRS stands for. He looks at me with surprise. 'Direct Rail Services,' he says. This is the name of a freight operator.
'Three 37s are coming in a moment,' says the giant.
'I'd go anywhere for a 37,' says the man with the flask of tea.
The group edges towards the end of the platform, where a debate breaks out.
'It's set for platform three,' says a bald man in a denim jacket and a red shirt with a Virgin Trains logo. As might be expected, many rail company employees have an interest in trains.
'For ****'s sake!' says the giant.
He and the Virgin Trains man begin to sprint away, apparently heading for platform three.
The tiny elderly man wearing two anoraks, the man with the flask of tea and I watch them depart. They are uncertain whether the 37s will go to platform three. As I do not feel like racing around Crewe station on a chilly overcast day in the north-west of England, I decide to stick with their camp. Their opinion, however, changes as the 37s draw near. They look nervously at one another.
'Shall we?' asks the man with the tea.
'Yes! Yes!' Double-anorak nods.
They scurry off, clutching cameras that would otherwise swing wildly from their necks. I follow my new companions.
Regular passengers look on with bewilderment. We must make quite a spectacle. We arrive moments after the 37s have come to a halt. We have reached platform one, which is deemed to have the best view of the freight locomotives.
The giant says, 'Very fine examples of a 37.'
The Virgin Trains man says, 'Proper locos.'
The man wearing two anoraks, panting from his run, says, 'Locos. 1960s. English electric. Type three. Class 37. Over fifty years old.'
They snap away. The man with the flask of tea says he takes 200 shots a day, but will edit them to 60. Many of these will be posted online. We admire the three locomotives: solidly built with navyblue bodies and bulbous mustard-yellow noses. DIRECT RAIL SERVICES is written on their sides. They are unlike any I can remember seeing on British railways – more like something you might expect to see crossing the American West – though I have never, admittedly, previously kept an eye out for class-37 freight locos at Crewe station.
I ask the group if they have spotted them before.
'Oh, many times. They're old friends,' says the Virgin Trains employee, not lifting his gaze from the locos.
I ask what they like most about trains.
'The smell of diesel. The sight of steam,' says the giant.
The man with two anoraks looks far away for a moment, as though recalling a long-lost love or a happy moment from his youth. Perhaps he is. After a while, he says, 'I just like travel and trains – always have done.'
The Virgin Trains employee cuts in: 'Why do we like trains? Why do we like them?' He pauses and lets the repeated question sink in. Of the four, he seems the most defensive about their passion for railways. He looks me squarely in the eyes. A horn blows across the tracks. Muffled announcements echo in the concourse. The engines of the 37 freight locomotives judder and grumble.
'Well,' he says. 'Well, I think you've just seen why.'
I suppose I have. What is it about trains? Trainspotters at Crewe station may be an extreme example of 'train love', but most people seem to have a soft spot for rail travel. Ask just about anyone what they think of travelling by train and a thoughtful expression tends to flicker across the features, often accompanied by a warm smile and a glint in the eye.
'There's a romance about trains,' is a common reply. 'I just like looking out of the window, seeing the world go by,' is another. 'I hate being stuck in a car or cooped up in a plane,' some will say. 'It's the motion: the clickety-clack,' say others. Or: 'You get to see places away from the mainstream, places you wouldn't otherwise visit.' Or: 'They're a greener way to go.' And, popular with those frustrated by the fast pace of modern life: 'I like to slow down; to stop rushing about; to take a break from it all.'
Underlying each response seems to be a gut feeling that trains offer a calmer, less stressful, more illuminating and somehow more real way of getting from A to B than other forms of travel.
Flying and driving just don't seem to elicit the same reaction. Why is that?
In his book The Old Patagonian Express, the great train-travel writer Paul Theroux describes a satisfactory flight as being one in which there is no accident, the food's OK and you arrive on time. You enter a dingy fuselage, he says, and count the minutes till you land.
That's as good as flying gets, according to Theroux, and I'm with him on that. A decent drive has a similar checklist: you did not have an accident; you did not get stuck in traffic; you did not break down; you avoided a speeding ticket; you arrived, more or less on schedule, without any dents in your bumpers. Yes, there are some famously beautiful drives and, let's face it, the experience is likely to be slightly different in a Maserati than in a battered Ford Mondeo, but most of the time driving involves little more than facing straight ahead, keeping an eye on the petrol gauge… and trying not to get sucked into road rage.
Perhaps it is the tedium of driving along characterless motorways or flying between identikit airports in identikit planes that has fuelled a recent bubble of interest in train travel. It certainly seems as though this rather quaint form of getting about that dates from the early nineteenth century – so old-fashioned next to super-jumbos, private jets, low-cost transatlantic flights, £30 hops on Wizz Air around Europe and the latest £200,000 sports cars drooled over by Jeremy Clarkson – is enjoying a quiet revival.
Facts and figures, plus many a nostalgic television programme starring Michael Portillo clasping a copy of Bradshaw's rail guide, seem to bear this out. While the precise number is tricky to establish, the current total length of railway tracks across the world is believed to be approximately 725,000 miles. This works out as the equivalent of an extraordinary 34 lines around the circumference of the globe. During a period when airlines have boomed with headline-grabbing prices catching the public's imagination, trains have been prospering too – the only difference being that word does not always get out as new tracks and services are local, so they tend to slip beneath the radar. A new railway in India or China might easily pass us by, while a cut-price fare from Gatwick to, say, Florida or Bangkok will be hard to miss: advertised across the media in papers, on TV and online.
Digging about a bit, however, it's clear that train travel is enjoying a resurgence not seen for many a year. Just take what's going on in Europe. In France, the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) network grows annually, with speeds increasing so much that some Parisians sick of the big smoke are considering moving to Bordeaux and commuting from there. In Spain, trains now zoom through most of the plains thanks to forward-thinking investment in tracks. As I write, this country has the most extensive set of high-speed lines in Europe, covering more than 1,900 miles. In Italy, millions of euros have been spent on long-distance routes between Milan and Naples and a line linking Milan and Zurich via a 38-mile tunnel through the Alps. The NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel will be the world's longest train tunnel and will shave an hour off the current trip, reducing the journey time to 2 hours and 50 minutes. Swiss authorities have taken 20 years to complete the digging, during which 31 million tonnes of earth have been moved at a cost of £6.5 billion. Elsewhere, high-speed railways now connect Kraków and Gdynia via Warsaw and Gdańsk in Poland, where a network of lines is growing rapidly. In Britain, resistance to new tracks has been understandably fierce among those who do not want disruption near their homes, but work on High Speed 2, from London up to Birmingham and onwards in a Y-shape to Leeds and Manchester, is due to start, with extensions to Newcastle and Scotland under consideration.
Further afield, China has more high-speed train lines than the rest of the world combined: 19,000 kilometres and growing, most of which have been laid in the past dozen years. Proof, if it were needed, that where there's a will and an autocratic government with cash to blow, there's usually a way. Indian Railways has steadily widened its web of trains and carries an average of 23 million passengers a day, looked after by an army of 1.3 million employees. Many multibillion-rupee projects are planned, including bullet trains on a 1,375-mile stretch between Delhi and Chennai.
Just about everywhere you go across the globe – if you discount Africa (because of its many political troubles) and the polar caps (because they're mainly populated by penguins and polar bears) – it's an exciting time for trains. Sure, it may not always feel that way in major cities, where commuter services are usually so appalling – and don't I know it during the morning rush hour to Waterloo – but a rail revolution is under way.
This book hopes to explain why. The passion for trains runs strong, and not just in Crewe, as I am about to discover on a series of journeys from the depths of Siberia to little-visited parts of Kosovo, the forests of Finland, the badlands of America, the mountains of India, the paddy fields of China, the tea plantations of Sri Lanka and the dusty plains of Iran.
My aim is to capture the simple pleasures of trains; the gentle joy that comes from seeing the world as the wheels rattle and roll, and the miles tick by. The sounds, smells, sights, feel and the taste (in buffet cars) of train journeys – the reasons we seem to love trains so much.
It is not, however, all about my point of view. Far from it. It's about those of the people I meet along the way. One of the appeals of train travel is, of course, its sociability, especially if you are on a long ride. Trains offer a completely different social environment to planes – Theroux's nightmare of awful food and delays in which interaction with neighbours often boils down to asking if you can pass to go to the loo. And as for cars: what chance have you got of making pals on the M25, unless it's with a breakdown services employee?
Before I begin, though, let me return to Crewe.
I chose the station not just because of its renowned trainspotters, but also because of its place in the railway history of Britain – the country where passenger railways began back on 15 September 1830, when Robert Stephenson's Rocket pulled the first carriages on a proper line. The distance of this inaugural journey between Liverpool and Manchester was 35 miles, and on this first ride the Rocket touched 35 mph; so fast that some feared cows in passing fields would be frightened and cease producing milk, while others believed that passengers' eyes might be damaged.
In 1846 this historic line merged with two others to create the London and North Western Railway, considered by some to be the world's first major railway. It was a big moment, but the owners were in two minds about where to base the crucial 'works' to build locomotives and carriages. After toying with Edge Hill in Liverpool, Crewe was selected as it marked a convenient midpoint between Liverpool and Birmingham.
'Before that time there was nothing here: just fields,' says Mike Lenz, general manager at the Crewe Heritage Centre.
The pre-railway population of Crewe was about 70. The town and surrounding area are now home to 84,000 residents, plus a football team nicknamed the Railwaymen. If it wasn't for the railway, Crewe – as we know it – simply would not exist.
I meet Lenz at his office in a back room of the heritage centre, next to a display hall with a model railway. He's wearing a highvisibility jacket, leaning back in a swivel chair and looking slightly eccentric with his legs crossed and his eyes glancing through a tall glass window.
A train zooms by – a metre or so beyond the window. I almost jump backwards, it's so close.
'Great, isn't it,' says Lenz, his eyes fixed on the carriages as they thunder past.
The train disappears. And then I notice another sound. It's the grumble and grind of a different train, and it's coming from a monitor on his desk.
'Webcam,' says Lenz. 'Captures the sounds of the trains on our site.'
The heritage centre, which opened in 1987 and is run by a trust, is located within a V-shape of tracks right by Crewe station. Warehouses and yards are packed with old railway paraphernalia, shiny locos and carriages.
'Bombardier still has some works in Crewe,' says Lenz. He's referring to the Canadian aerospace and transport company. 'Locomotives were made until about 1990. Now it's just component repairs. They fix bogies.'
I ask what a bogie is.
Lenz looks at me in disbelief. 'A bogie is what the locomotive sits on.' I gather from this that he means the wheels and the chassis. The words 'trains' and 'steep learning curve' are suddenly springing to mind.
'All we have now is about 250 or 300, but there used to be 10,000 or more,' Lenz says, talking about staff numbers at Crewe Works. 'It's sad,' he says. As is another matter that seems to be weighing on his mind: 'Volunteers. Now we have guys in their forties and fifties, but it's getting the younger ones interested.'
By 'younger ones', Lenz means younger train volunteers who will enjoy rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty polishing and repairing old locos and carriages.
'Are there just not enough trainspotters these days?' I ask.
He looks at me askance. Once again I appear to be demonstrating my train ignorance. 'I think that "rail enthusiasts" is now more appropriate,' he says, as another locomotive bombs by.
'What is the image of a rail enthusiast these days?' I ask.
'The image is changing,' Lenz replies, a little vaguely. He stares at me for a second or two. His look seems to be asking: Are you taking the ****? I'm not, though I can see he is unsure. There are so many jokes about the hobby – 'How many trainspotters does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to change it, one to take down its serial number, and one to bring the anoraks and the flask of soup' – that I'm detecting a definite touchiness.
'In what way?'
'They're older. Back in the 1960s you had young children interested,' Lenz says, returning to what seems to be a favourite theme.
It was the era of steam trains, chugging to its end in the 1960s, when rail enthusiasm was instilled in so many, he explains. The phenomenon of 'trainspotting', which I dare to write (though not mention in the presence of Lenz), has its roots firmly in those days of steam. 'Spotters' are said to date originally from 1942, when a Southern Railway employee named Ian Allan published his seminal (in spotter circles) ABC of Southern Locomotives. This booklet was followed by many further ABC publications produced by Allan, considered by some to be the 'godfather of trainspotters', which allowed those with an interest to tick off steam locomotives they had sighted, or 'copped'.
Now, despite the absence of inspiring plumes of smoke along most railways, according to Lenz: 'We need those young people again. It's a tall order, but we do need them so they can come to us and learn how to operate and overhaul steam trains. If they don't come, they [the old working steam trains] are all going to disappear.'
We say goodbye and, as we do so, the monitor on Lenz's desk captures the sound of another Pendolino. His eyes glance down at the desk and I suddenly realise (or maybe I'm just imagining this) that he finds the sound of the wheels on the track somehow reassuring.
Following Lenz's advice, I take in the APT Prototype, BR Class 370 by the entrance to the heritage centre. And what a fine example of an APT Prototype, BR Class 370 it is: well polished and shiny, with carriages sporting natty checked seats.
Then I retire to the Crewe Arms Hotel, where Queen Victoria once stayed and where the manager shows me the bricked-up entrance to a tunnel between the hotel and the station that was dug so Queen Victoria could avoid the crowds.
'Oh yes, an awful lot of trainspotters stay here,' the manager says. 'The ones that take down train numbers.' Apparently, the hardcore rail enthusiasts usually request one of the rooms facing the station so they can indulge in a bit of extra spotting from the comfort of the hotel. 'It's almost all railway business round here.'
Many of the other guests are freight-line drivers, conductors or trainees from a nearby Virgin Trains training centre. So that everyone's in touch and on time, there's even a Crewe station departure board in the reception.
I have a drink in the bar, with old pictures of Crewe Works lining the walls, feeling that this is an appropriate place to begin these adventures. Most people round here – the manager, my fellow guests, the folk not far away at the end of the platforms – seem to love trains.
I'm in a train-hotel in train-land, and I'm about to set off into a train-world.
2
KOSOVO AND MACEDONIA: 'YOU CAN SPOT A GRICER A MILE AWAY'
I'M NOT DONE with platform-dwelling 'rail enthusiasts' yet, though. Before I dig beneath the surface of the mainstream love of trains – and in order to understand the inner workings of train enthusiasm – I decide to become one for a few days.
That's right: I'm going to turn my hand at being a trainspotter for a week. A trainspotter on holiday, to be precise – in southeastern Europe.
This involves signing up to a package tour to Kosovo and Macedonia organised especially for those who are fond of trains. The trip is arranged by Ffestiniog Travel, a company based in north Wales that offers 'rail holidays around the world'. One of its selling points is that the tours are designed for people 'who require their holiday to be as much about the railways as the destination'; in other words, for trainspotters, as well as those who simply get a kick out of travelling by rail.
The tour operator is a registered charity and something of a rail-enthusiast institution, established in 1974, with profits going towards the restoration of the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland railways in north Wales. The Ffestiniog Railway is the oldest narrow-gauge railway company in the world, dating from 1836 and running for 13 miles from the harbour at Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog, using locomotives that are more than 150 years old. Meanwhile the Welsh Highland Railway, also narrow gauge, runs for 25 miles from Caernarfon to Beddgelert, the longest such heritage railway in Britain. Linked and covering a combined ascent of more than 700 feet into the foothills of dramatic mountains, the railways were originally built to transport slate from inland quarries to ships, using gravity to roll down to the coast with full loads and horses to drag empty wagons back up; until steam locomotives were introduced in the 1860s, that is.
The term 'narrow gauge' refers to the width of the tracks, which are precisely 1 foot 11½ inches apart on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland railways (I am reliably informed), whereas standard tracks in the UK, and 60 per cent of all train lines in the world, are separated by a gap of exactly 4 feet 8½ inches. This standard gauge was established by George Stephenson, the engineer behind the Manchester–Liverpool railway that opened in 1830 (and father of Robert, the designer of the Rocket). His picture used to be found on the back of the British £5 note. Standard gauge is also known as 'Stephenson gauge'.
Ffestiniog Travel began offering holidays after its base in Porthmadog became a ticketing office for British Rail in the 1970s, giving its directors the idea to put together breaks with train tickets included – and not just in Britain, but further afield in Europe too. British Rail had been in the process of de-staffing its smaller stations in the wake of cuts to rural services introduced by Dr Beeching, chairman of British Railways, in the 1960s. These notorious cutbacks, known as the Beeching Axe, resulted in the closure of 6,000 miles of tracks in Britain. The Ffestiniog directors' actions were therefore crucial to keeping a small part of the north Wales network going.
This is how I find myself on a station platform in the capital of Kosovo with about 30 serious and not so serious (and a few seriously serious) railway lovers. It's a sunlit afternoon in the former war zone in south-eastern Europe. All had been quiet at Pristina station until our arrival. All is not now. We have just arrived at the sleepy spot, but already most of our group have swarmed onto the tracks, brandishing cameras and snapping away merrily, even though there is not a train in sight. Other than us, the only two passengers awaiting the 16:30 to Peja are a pregnant woman and an elderly man wearing shades. Their jaws drop as our motley crew runs amok, taking pictures of the station, the tracks, signal boxes, signs and sidings. Among rail enthusiasts, as I have already discovered during my short acquaintance, it is not just the train that is of interest. It is anything and everything train-related.
Clambering about the tracks appears to be allowed. A burgundy-capped stationmaster is watching with an expression that somehow combines indifference and complete disbelief. It is a bizarre scene. The rail enthusiasts with their expensive cameras are not at all shy or reserved, as some had been a few minutes earlier on the bus. They are taking over the short platform and establishing themselves, gung-ho and full of gusto. Several have lined up at one end in readiness for our train, which is due shortly. They seem anxious to secure the perfect angle, and a few have bunched together at one spot.
Pristina station has the look of a gingerbread house, with peachpink walls and arched doorways. Black-and-white pictures of old railways and stations are to be found in the ticket hall. I am standing by one of these, taking in proceedings, when I am joined by Johnnie, an IT consultant from Birmingham in his forties. He is tall and thin, with owlish eyes blinking beneath circular glasses and a 1970s-style moustache that curls round each side of his mouth. He wears faded jeans and prominently large pristine-white trainers. Johnnie shows me the ticket he has just bought to Peja, about 60 kilometres west: a souvenir for the trip, as Ffestiniog Travel has chartered and paid for a private carriage. Then he points at the nearest, caption-less picture on the wall, recognising it.
'Penn Station before it was demolished and they built Madison Square Garden on it,' Johnnie says, referring to the station in New York which I will be visiting in a few weeks' time. It was torn down, he tells me, in 1963.
Rail enthusiasts are full of such handy titbits.
We gaze down the platform. The pregnant woman rises and comes over in readiness for the train. I ask her if she has seen any trainspotters before. She is from Peja and has some English.
'Nothing like this before. Not in my life,' she says.
There is a stirring on the platform. Everyone moves to the far end. The big event is coming soon. A faint trail of black smoke can be seen in the distance. The smoke draws closer and soon a big red train with yellow streaks growls into view, rattling up with a blast of its horn and a series of shrill whistles. Cameras click as though we're by the red carpet on Oscars night. There's electricity in the air. This is why Ffestiniog's customers have paid to come to Kosovo, for a journey that's continuing onwards to Macedonia and Albania to the south: trains they've never seen before.
At this happy moment, I am beside Steve, a 57-year-old retired accountant who once worked for the Shell oil and gas company. He's from Whitchurch in Shropshire and has already quietly confided in me that perhaps he retired too early. Rail enthusiasts are incredibly open about their lives, I am also discovering. Earlier, Steve had been among the more subdued of the group. Now, however, he is transformed: elated and beaming, full of life.
'A proper loco pulling dead carriages,' he says. 'This is what everyone was hoping for. They're delighted.'
I ask what he means by 'dead carriages'. It seems there's always some term or other I'm not au fait with.
'Usually there's an engine under the first carriage,' Steve says.
'Ah,' I reply, and nod knowingly, as though I really knew this all along.
Actually, I've just learnt something – and it's only the start. I'm about to discover a whole lot more.
'Rail enthusiasts get a bad press… but we're fair game for it'
Pristina to Peja, Kosovo
We board our dead carriage and sit on old red seats with a thin grey zigzag pattern as the train moves on to Peja. If you don't count a short burst from Mortlake to Vauxhall stations in south London, the Tube and my Virgin trains from London Euston to Crewe and back, this is the first proper ride of the adventure. We clatter and sway past grim communist-era apartment blocks and tumbledown yards. Smoke from the engine sweeps past the window. There's something pleasing about the way it does this, almost as though we're on an old-fashioned steam train, rather than one that's simply pumping fumes into the sky.
Alan, our tour leader, advises us to look out for a train depot at a fork in the line. The depot comes into view, prompting another paparazzi-style volley of camera shots. The keenest photographers squeeze lenses out of little windows that open at the top of the main windows. There is no small competition to get the best position to do this. As we pass, all heads turn to regard the ramshackle structure. After this excitement, we continue on through green rolling hills with patchwork fields of crops and the occasional tractor.
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 trains 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).