TALES FROM THE
FAST TRAINS
EUROPE AT 186 MPH
TALES FROM THE FAST TRAINS
Copyright © Tom Chesshyre, 2011
Map by Robert Littleford
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p.11, extract from ‘Cornish Cliffs’ by John Betjeman
p.104, extract from The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
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Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material; should there be any omissions in this respect we apologise and shall be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
In memory of my grandparents, Neville & Alison, and John & Dora, train travellers from a bygone age
Tom Chesshyre is staff travel writer on The Times and the author of How Low Can You Go?: Round Europe for 1p Each Way (Plus Tax) and To Hull and Back: On Holiday in Unsung Britain. He lives in London.
Tales from the Fast Trains
‘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
To Hull and Back
‘Tom Chesshyre celebrates the UK… discovering pleasure in the unregarded wonders of the “unfashionable underbelly” of Britain’
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘You warm to Chesshyre, whose cultural references intelligently inform his postcards from locations less travelled’
THE TIMES
‘People don’t take trains – trains take people.’
(after John Steinbeck)
It’s a hot August morning at a bus depot in south London. There’s no bus in sight; not a single vehicle, not even a driver lurking in a corner smoking a fag. Minutes tick by as the sun bakes down on a forlorn concourse dotted with blackened pieces of bubblegum and strewn with fast-food wrappers. A sign informs us (I have been joined by a kindly elderly woman with a tartan shopping trolley) that the service runs ‘about every 6–10 minutes’. We wait at least a quarter of an hour before a bus arrives, driven at a rate of knots by a bald, expressionless man, his copy of the Daily Star wedged on the dashboard. The bus skids to a stop. We board. Then it zooms away, flashing past suburban houses, as though there’s some sort of emergency. The kindly elderly woman, gripping a rail tightly, glances at me and raises her eyebrows, seeming to suggest: ‘Par for the course.’ Which, we know only too well, it definitely is.
And so I make it to my local Tube station, where a humid carriage full of tourists awaits. An enormous American sitting next to me is flicking through a London guidebook. She says to her companion: ‘We godda go see Lee-ces-ter Square.’ An unshaven fellow opposite is wearing a ‘Prague Pub Crawl’ T-shirt. He looks queasy, as though he’s been up all night; perhaps he’s just come back from Heathrow after a stag do. A woman with a child who has been crying slaps her, inducing yet more tears (and glances of disapproval from fellow passengers). It’s becoming stiflingly hot as the carriage fills and the train rolls onwards to South Kensington – as though there’s not enough air to go round. Football supporters with Chelsea and Manchester United shirts join us, bringing an aroma of lager to the mix: it’s the morning of their Community Shield match. Is there going to be some kind of brawl? There isn’t. They’re too interested in studying the Tube map, discussing which pubs to visit next.
A typical London journey: delays, discomforts, dirt, overcrowding, with a bit of tension thrown in. But then the escalator rises into St Pancras International station, and everything changes. On the way to the ticket office, I pass a stylish ‘Sourced Market’, all gleaming tiles, spotlights and shiny display cabinets, with baskets piled high with cucumbers, plum tomatoes, apricots and organic potatoes. There are stacks of fresh loaves, salmon fillets, couscous lunches and pesto salads, and counters filled with tubs of cheeses, salamis and chutneys. Beyond this, on a corner turning into the main run of shops, whitewashed wooden tables are waiting for customers to try out a selection of organic wines lined on neat shelves. Even though we’re inside, it’s light and airy. Sophisticated-looking folk in sunglasses are sipping espressos at a cafe across the way; possibly French or Italian, judging by their casual espresso-drinking ways. I walk on by, taking in an expensive chocolate shop, a Thomas Pink store (shirts £59), Rituals (purveyors of ‘upmarket body toiletries’), and a florist selling £20 bunches of flowers. Everything seems well-to-do, smart and far removed from the rest of London. No ‘Prague Pub Crawl’ T-shirts, football supporters, piles of litter or sense of slumming it here. I collect our tickets from a machine without a queue opposite a Body Shop, and then take another escalator to the level of the platforms.
It’s quieter up by the trains. I don’t venture into the champagne and oyster bar, where a couple of women are happily enjoying midday flutes of bubbly. Instead, I make my way further along to the statue of John Betjeman, who is captured gazing upwards, holding on to his hat, with his jacket flying out behind him. He’s wearing rolled trousers with his feet sticking out comically. A sign gives the years of his life (1906–1984) and describes him simply as ‘POET, who saved this glorious station’ – Betjeman campaigned to stop St Pancras from being bulldozed in the 1960s. I look up at the pale-blue criss-crosses of the semicircular roof, completed in 1868 by the brilliant Victorian engineer William Henry Barlow. What an overwhelming sense of space; it seems impossible that the structure came so close to being destroyed. Lines from a Betjeman poem are etched in a circle on the concourse: ‘And in the shadowless unclouded glare/ Deep blue above us fades to whiteness where/ A misty sea-line meets the wash of air.’ It captures the feeling of the station above perfectly. And as I ponder how the lines seem to describe the scene so precisely, an American family walks by.
The child points at the statue and asks: ‘What’s that?’
The mother replies: ‘A statue.’
The father steps forward to look more closely. ‘John Betjeman,’ he says.
They scratch their heads and stare at the amusing statue of the station’s patron saint.
‘He sure looks funny,’ says the mother.
And with that they make their way towards the trains.
I’m meeting my girlfriend E by Betjeman at noon but there’s no sign of her. Has she got caught up in traffic on her bus? (She lives quite close by in Shoreditch.) Did I give her the wrong time? (I can’t get hold of her as her mobile seems to be switched off or out of reception.) Minutes tick by and I begin to wonder if we’re going to make our train; it leaves at 1 p.m. and you’ve got to check in half an hour beforehand. Then I look towards the huge bronze statue depicting lovers embracing near the station clock. The statue is called The Meeting Place, and I can see E standing beneath it. I walk across.
‘I just went to the big statue,’ she says. ‘The big romantic statue!’
‘It’s the wrong statue,’ I point out.
She looks at me nonplussed. ‘But I like this statue better,’ she replies, with logic that’s difficult to crack.
We take a few pictures by The Meeting Place to mark the start of our adventures: it would, admittedly, have been more romantic to meet here. Then we rush through security (no hassles, no queues, no taking off shoes or belts, no confiscated bottles of water or peculiar body scans), up a travelator, and along the platform to carriage number 12.
Soon, we’re off. The train pulls away, bang on time, drawing out of Barlow’s beautiful station into the August sunshine. It’s a lovely day to be heading south. And the feeling of ‘being on holiday’, of getting away from it all, hits us immediately. Psychotic bus drivers, overheated underground carriages, crowds and London in general seem somehow distant, as though by boarding the train we’ve stepped into another country. North London may be outside, with its graffiti and traffic jams, but we are on our way to the Continent… already anticipating the weekend ahead.
There’s a strong sense of happily not quite knowing what’s coming next, as well as a realisation that these weekends have crept up on us out of the blue. You see, it’s not as though we’re train obsessives, or that we refuse to fly for ‘green reasons’. Quite the opposite: I’ve always enjoyed catching flights and the sense of excitement of airports, even when departing from the dreariest terminals at Heathrow. In fact, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about train travel. Yes, I quite like chugging along and watching through the window as the world passes by, but with all these cheap flights to obscure spots in Eastern Europe, sunny reaches of the Mediterranean and exotic locations halfway round the globe, I never got round to trying Eurostar.
Until, that is, I was sent to Paris on a last-minute work assignment. Eurostar had been running for almost a decade by then, and I found the experience a revelation. In just over two hours (2 hrs 15 min. to be precise) I was in the French capital, having woken up that morning expecting a run-of-the-mill day in the office. Instead, I was walking past Notre Dame and through the Latin Quarter, poking my head in patisseries and stopping at lovely old cafes that I imagined George Orwell visiting in Down and Out in Paris and London, one of my favourite books.
It was all so quick; so easy to get out of London and enter a totally different culture. And it made me wonder whether the hassle of airport security and catching annoying connecting shuttles into city centres at the other end was worth it. I loved the sensation of being catapulted out of Britain straight into the heart of an interesting European city. On that first trip, strolling along the Seine and visiting the serene and sprawling Père-Lachaise cemetery, seeing the graves of Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison between work appointments, I was totally won over. What better way to travel? The seats were much bigger on Eurostar than on easyJet or Ryanair. You could stroll about without risking the wrath of cabin crews. You only had to arrive half an hour before departure. It just seemed so civilised.
Since that first experience, we’ve visited Ghent (a quaint Flemish city with lovely canals and a sleepy feel), Brussels (staying in a charming hotel by the Grand Place) and Amsterdam (to see the art galleries). All on speedy, lively and highly memorable weekend breaks.
But why stop there? I began to look at the high-speed map… and a plan of sorts soon formed. It was a simple plan, but I couldn’t wait to get it started. I was going to explore Europe on its fast trains. Why not? The tickets were not too expensive, just £69 return to Paris or Brussels. I’ve paid more for journeys to Birmingham, taking about the same time as reaching Paris. And the map was full of intriguing possibilities: Dijon, Luxembourg, Bruges, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Tours, Lausanne, Marseilles. Why not try a few of those?
Fast trains to Paris, Lille and Brussels began on 14 November 1994. But now you can go at 186 mph to all sorts of places, with high-speed tracks being laid down across Europe constantly. The link through the Netherlands to Amsterdam (journey from St Pancras 4 hrs 16 min.) was completed not so long ago. There are plans for connections to Italy and Spain; a link between Paris and Figueres in northern Spain recently opened, reducing the journey time by ninety minutes. You can already reach dozens of places throughout France. Not only is there the excitement and fun of catching all these new rides – there’s also the sense that high-speed rail travel will be everywhere soon; that Europe will be linked by faster and faster services (200 mph trains are on their way), and that the nature of Europe itself, and how we see it and travel around it, is about to change.
It’s as if Europe is shrinking by the day. The day I write this, a story in The Sunday Times news section declares: ‘TRAINS TO BEAT PLANES ACROSS EUROPE. IT WILL SOON BE QUICKER TO REACH MANY CITIES BY NEW HIGH-SPEED RAIL LINKS THAN BY JET: AIRPORT DELAYS AND RISING TAXES BOOST THE APPEAL OF RAIL TRAVEL.’ The fast tracks seem to be conquering the Continent – we can zip about at vast speeds to places that would have been days away a century ago, major journeys, without taking to the skies. A few hours in a comfortable carriage can get you a very long way. Climb on board at St Pancras and vast swathes of land have opened up: so many places for a new type of weekend break.
So with a quiet six months ahead and a part-time job that makes long weekends for travel possible, I’ve decided to give it a go. I’ll head off on a series of adventures: a trip every fortnight or so. It’ll be an insight into places I might never have otherwise visited. It’ll also – at least I hope so – turn out to be fun. Isn’t that what a weekend break should be all about, after all?
‘You’re hurtling towards forty, this could be your last chance for years,’ says E, seeming to relish the word ‘hurtling’, as the train squeals along north London tunnels in the direction of Kent.
I give her a look. E’s a few years younger – a fact she loves to remind me of. ‘Give me a break, love,’ I reply.
‘You couldn’t do this with kids,’ she says baldly.
I pause to take this in. I know what she’s driving at, but I’m not quite sure how to answer. ‘I think you could with a small child,’ I say, after a bit. You could, I reckon, easily travel with a baby for a high-speed weekend – it would probably be easier than travelling by plane.
But E continues to twist the knife, enjoying her ‘you’ll soon be past it’ line of conversation. ‘This could be your last footloose summer,’ she continues, warming to her theme in the strange orange light of our carriage as it passes beneath the City.
‘Hmmm,’ I reply.
‘I mean that in a good way: let’s make the most of it,’ she says.
And with that she flags down a steward in a charcoal-grey uniform: we’re travelling in Premium Leisure for a first-trip treat. Soon a mini bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (for E) and a burgundy (for me) are delivered.
‘Here’s to high-speed Europe,’ says E, raising her glass.
We drink to the trip ahead, papers and guidebooks spread out on our neat table with its cute little lamp. So much better, so much more comfortable, so much more the way it should be, than on a budget plane. No sticky seats, no stag groups, no jammed knees or crunched limbs. Just a decent drop of vin, a fast train, and two hours to go till Paris.
The hills, haystacks, vineyards, electricity pylons and motorways of Kent soon flash past. Britain seems better when it’s a bit of a blur, I’m thinking, as we cross a delightful expanse of the Medway and pass alongside the M20, watching traffic heading slowly for the ferries and the Channel Tunnel. Apple groves and cornfields spread out across the gently undulating landscape before we reach the Folkestone White Horse – a striking limestone figure of a horse with a flowing main and tail carved into a hill overlooking the tunnel’s terminal. Apparently there was a great fuss when this was created by the local artist Charlie Newington in 2003 as the hill is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and nature groups opposed this Millennium project. But it looks inspiring, to me, from the train; a sort of goodbye wave to tunnel-goers, or a hello welcome to people coming in the other direction.
And then we plunge into the calming darkness, the lights flicker orange again, we level out, and I imagine all the water, all the ferries and cargo ships (and fish) up above. In a half-hour dash from St Pancras we have left Britain behind. Now we’ve got cod and mackerel and wrecks of old ships and many millions of gallons of water on top of carriage number 12. The train drops to 100 m below sea level at its deepest point – I know this because a ‘Tunnel Trivia’ section of Eurostar’s Metropolitan magazine says so – running through the gritty chalk that stretches across the Channel.
We may have been able to do this for a decade and a half or so, since the tunnel opened, but it still feels somehow impossible. Each time I go, I can’t help getting the same sensation. Are we really riding trains under the sea?
Our destination is Dijon, the capital of Burgundy; we’re changing in Paris for a TGV connection onwards: TGV stands for Trains à Grande Vitesse and is the high-speed part of SNCF (French railways), which we’re soon about to get to know very well. I’ve never been to Dijon and am curious. We read up on the city, which has a ‘slick prosperity’ and is an ‘affluent university town: smart, modern and young’, according to the Rough Guide. There’s also a section about the golden age of the Dukes of Burgundy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. ‘He looks like a rum fellow,’ says E, examining a picture of Philip the Bold – who appears to be wearing make-up. Our hotel is named after the first of the great dukes, Philip the Good. The Rough Guide’s verdict is ‘some rooms stunning, others a little bland’ – which sounds a bit hit or miss; the hotel had looked pretty good on the Internet.
We shoot back up above the ground into the light, settled in our grey leather seats with their purple leather headrests as French fields and flatlands that have been fought over in so many bloody battles come into view. There’s an ugly plastics factory and several large pyramid-shaped piles of gravel in the approach to Lille. Feeling a little sleepy after the wine, we have a snooze and wake to find ourselves travelling through a corridor of graffiti in the banlieue of Paris. Bright swirls declare the names of the graffiti artists: ‘YOKOK, ‘BANKO’ and ‘DIAL’. Then we look at our watches. And something dawns on us. We’ve got just thirty-five minutes to reach Gare de Lyon from Gare du Nord for the onward train to Dijon. Is that enough time?
This is how we find ourselves in a taxi driven by a man who looks like a funeral director, listening to France’s version of Jazz FM and speeding along Boulevard de Magenta, scattering pedestrians at every intersection. E has asked the pale-faced driver, who is dressed in a black suit and has heavy black rings under his eyes, to go vite. And he is not messing about. A haunting blues number is surreally playing as we make our dramatic progress. E looks at me as if I should somehow take matters in hand (what can I do? anyway, he’s making good time) as we take an impressive swerve to miss a bollard, passing a bench where a kissing couple glances up, looking at the driver as though he’s mad.
He clearly is. He seems to be going even faster as the music switches to a soulful rendition of a song with the line ‘Every time we say goodbye, I die a little’ near Place de la République. He takes the Place about as quickly as is physically possibly in an old Renault. We slide about in the back seat, seeing the world ÉGALITÉ inscribed at the foot of a statue of a famous figure – it’s too fast to tell who. And so we reach the station, with seven minutes to spare before the TGV to Dijon. I pay the nine-euro fare. The funeral director smiles thinly, with just a hint of a twinkle in his eyes. Then we race to a distant platform in a far-off annex and board the first TGV of our trip. The doors close almost immediately behind us. ‘If there’d been a queue for the taxi we would have been staying in Paris tonight,’ E accurately declares. ‘Don’t they have a policy or something on how long you should have between trains? I mean, that was skin of the teeth stuff.’
The TGV is a smart affair with black and grey stripy seats and a wine-red carpet. We are in a silent carriage and a sign on the seat in front says: ‘Merci de régler votre téléphone portable en mode vibreur.’ We slump in our seats and catch our breath for a bit. We’re sitting next to a woman who quickly falls asleep with her mouth wide open like a human goldfish, and a father who is playing cards with two well-behaved children. The flick and occasional slap of a game of twist is all we can hear in the carriage as we quickly leave Paris behind. The TGV holds the world record speed for a wheeled train at 357.2 mph (achieved by a lunatic test driver in 2007), and average speeds on journeys can reach above 170 mph. This compares to the Eurostar’s record speed of 208 mph, with a top speed of 186 mph and an average that varies depending on how many stops it makes.
We’re soon well out of the French capital, shooting through forests with a royal blue sky above, and breaking into rolling countryside covered in a patchwork of fields. Brown cows munch grass. Villages with green-shuttered houses come and go. We stop at the town of Montbard, where there are three tattered EU flags and a French tricolour on poles by the quiet station. It looks deadly dull, and the Rough Guide’s verdict is of the ‘pretty but otherwise unexciting hillside town of Montbard’.
E concurs: ‘It doesn’t look like we’re missing much.’
‘No, I don’t think we are,’ I reply – the place looks half asleep.
‘Let’s not add Montbard to the list,’ says E. The ‘list’, which we’re making up as we go along, is where we plan to go on our fast-train weekends. It’s a moveable feast: we’ll go where we fancy, always aiming for somewhere a bit different – somewhere we haven’t been that sounds worth investigating (normally a little bigger than Montbard, mind you).
‘OK, Montbard’s out,’ I say, as we pull away, soon passing wind farms and travelling along a glimmering brown river.
‘Actually, love, anywhere’s good with me. I just like the adventure. I’ll just pack my PJs and passport: you tell me where next!’ says E. In reality, though, we’re planning the journeys together, poring over maps and plotting routes in pubs after work, and on our weekends ‘off’ our fast-train jaunts. It’s that slightly random feeling of zooming away from Britain and seeing what the fast trains throw at us that I’m hoping to capture.
And with those thoughts in mind, we pull up at our first destination. ‘Bienvenu à Gare de Dijon,’ says a big sign.
‘I can’t believe we’re here, it was so quick,’ says E.
It’s been 1 hr 37 min. from Paris, and we are only a short taxi ride to the Philippe Le Bon hotel. It really does not feel as though we were (almost) meeting by the Betjeman statue just four and a half hours ago. We cross a modern plaza to a taxi rank, avoid a tramp reeking of one too many vins, and head for the hotel.
Our fast-train weekends have begun.