2 days ago
Lovers, lunatics and 80,000 meatballs: adventures on sleeper trains
Film buffs will know night trains as vehicles of love, lust and mystery. Consider Cary Grant top-bunking with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. Or Marilyn Monroe getting jiggy with a ukulele during an onboard pyjama party in Some Like It Hot. Silver screen sleepers are steamy stuff.
However, those who have taken the Great Western Railway sleeper from Paddington to Penzance will also know that a night train can be as sexy as a Travelodge on a wet Wednesday in February.
In Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train, the travel writer Monisha Rajesh eloquently and amusingly combines the fact and fiction, the cocktail hours and backed-up loos, the charming ticket inspectors and deranged fellow travellers, as she enjoys — and endures — 18 journeys spanning four continents.
Rajesh surveys a form of travel that many might have considered obsolete. However, she explains, the night train has risen from its slumbers. After the Covid lockdowns 'many people were nervous to fly, booking private compartments and taking the time to explore closer to home', she writes. 'In 2022, Interrail had a record year of sales — and then I saw it, one line at a time, sleeper trains inching back out of the darkness.'
Rajesh zips through moonlit mountain passes in Scandinavia and South America and takes city links in North America, Asia and Europe, routes that vary in quality, comfort and distance. On a press jolly on board the deluxe Belmond Andean Explorer to Arequipa, she enjoys pisco sours with a former Miss Peru and beds down on plush banquettes; in Turkey, she gets caught up in the maelstrom of the 2023 earthquake; and in the north of Norway, whistling through the land of the midnight sun, she enjoys a night train without night.
She soon discovers that sleeping arrangements rarely fail to disappoint — her 'first-class' compartment on the Shalimar Express across the north of India 'looked like it had been repurposed from a scrapyard'. Sometimes the accommodation is simply surreal: the new Vienna-Hamburg Nightjet service provides a morgue-style row of single-berth wooden lockers into which passengers slot and lock. 'It's like sleeping in a bread bin,' her travelling companion observes.
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While compartments, couchettes — dorm-rooms of bunk beds — or reclining seats provide rest, the beating heart of a night train is its dining car. The meals are often geographical signifiers: there's 'sweaty gravlax' in Sweden and Angus beef and whisky on the Royal Scotsman. But these trains are not for fussy eaters, Rajesh writes. 'I'd once spent five days on the Trans-Mongolian eating onlyinstant mash and noodles.'
Meanwhile, dining cars provide delicious opportunities for eavesdropping. 'Do you think people shag on these trains,' a woman whispers to her husband on the Caledonian Sleeper. 'I have,' a passenger at the next table interjects. 'The very last empty coach … we just got down to it.'
Since publishing Around the World in 80 Trains (2019), Rajesh has become a mother, which affords her considerable empathy for those dealing with sleepy, grumpy and hungry children as they clamber on board with the paraphernalia of parenthood. Sometimes her young daughters come along for the ride (confectionery and nappies required).
Rajesh is an endearing railway junkie — a German passenger calls her a 'Pufferküsser' — who has authored two previous anthologies of railway journeys. But there is something about the nocturnal quality of these trips that covers new, almost philosophical, terrain. At night everything is heightened, both the romantic — sunsets, cosy spaces, suggestive rhythmic motion — and the gripes that come with being cooped up with a bunch of strangers.
The sound of a train in the night suggests secrets: while cities, towns and villages sleep there is activity under way. Not all of it good. Rajesh touches on their sinister possibilities when she stops off in Brussels to meet Simon Gronowski, a nonagenarian Holocaust survivor. On a spring night in 1943, Simon's mother lowered her 11-year-old son on to the tracks from a moving cattle truck as it coursed through the darkness on its way to Auschwitz. The Nazis used the night-time to cover their crimes. Simon survived; his mother perished.
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The renaissance of the night train is driven by economic, environmental and social factors, all largely positive. However, as Rajesh explains in this hugely entertaining book, a night train is only as good as the people on board. Speeding to Lapland on the Santa Claus Express, impeccably polite Finnish attendants serve up meatballs (about 80,000 portions a year) and patiently look after hordes of over-excited children. It 'fulfilled my every dream', Rajesh concludes.
Compare that with the author's early morning experience between Washington DC and New York on Amtrak's Silver Meteor, a train summed up as a 'magnet for the unhinged'. Watching the sun rise over the Potomac River, Rajesh recalls: 'I crouched by the window to photograph the moment, just as a man in a sweatshirt tapped me on the shoulder and moved me to one side so he could vomit into the recycling bin.' Cary Grant would have been appalled.
Moonlight Express: Around the World by Night Train by Monisha Rajesh (Bloomsbury £22 pp336). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
