Sleeper trains are glamorous. Cary Grant used one as an escape route from New York when he was being pursued by the police for suspected murder in Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. The dining car scene with Eva Marie Saint is one of the great seduction scenes in cinema and it is just one in a long list of star roles played in films by the world’s famous night trains. Murder on the Orient Express, From Russia with love and Night train to Lisbon all centre their drama on nocturnal train-based activity.
Rail travel is dull… commuters, routine and suburbs. Travel on the night train is exotic, dangerous and laden with possibility. Who will you meet in the dining car? What might happen as the locomotive screams through the night time? What strange goings on will happen in the homes flashing past the speeding express? What will the guard find in cabin 42 when he goes to wake the occupant with a tray of tea? What nightmares will haunt the sleepers as they lie in troubled conscience unconsciousness? And who shall we follow as the merry band of passengers disperse to the new day upon reaching the final destination?
It is gripping stuff.
The inherent drama and pregnant expectation within the closeted universe of the night train was captured beautifully in W. H. Auden’s poem Night Mail which was turned into a lovely piece of advertising for British Rail by my old agency, Lowe Howard-Spink.
Sleeper trains have played a big role, not just in the movies but in my life, too. ‘My life – the movie’ definitely features one famous sleeper: The Cornish Riviera Express. Less 1920s flapper dresses, DJs, silver service and Russian Grand Duchesses with their Lady’s maid in tow. More refugee cross Channel ferry bar stewards in crumpled uniforms, a packet of Bourbons and a solitary tea bag in a NAAFI tin tea pot rattling along the decrepit West Coast line.
The Night train – the Sleeper service – departs from Platform 1 at Paddington station at a quarter to midnight every night, except Saturday. It covers a distance of just 253 miles in six hours. It is an old school way to travel. By way of comparison, a flight from London Heathrow airport to JFK in NYC is 3,443 miles. It takes one hour less than the sleeper train. But on the night train, you get your own cabin, a proper bed and a it takes you direct into the heart of town.
You can board and enter your cabin from 1030pm. Between 2006 and 2013 I used it once a week each way, give or take. When we moved to Penzance from Clapham, my original plan had been to learn to fly, take a part share in a small aeroplane with some other London refugees and fly up and down from the airstrip at Land’s End. That plan, as they say, never really took off. And so, along with many other Cornish-based business folk, the Night train was my lifeline. I used to drop my bags in the cabin and then wander off back into Paddington for a pint or two at the Fountains Abbey pub on Praed Street. Or a nice steak and a few glasses of Malbec at a favourite hotel brasserie near the station. I doubt you can do that now – its just waiting for a novelist to set a terrorist attack on the train – as it would be easy to check in (no ID is required, just a ticket), drop a bag off with a bomb inside it and scarper.
I used to enjoy going along to the lounge car where you can sit in comfort (sleeper ticket holders hold the status of First Class), get a night cap (whisky being mine), watch the drama of the whistle blowing and the train pulling out of historic Paddington station, and sip your drink contentedly as the locomotive picks up speed through the window-lit suburbs of London until the darkness of countryside descends. The staff became familiar faces and occasionally you find yourself sitting opposite a famous person: I remember striking up a conversation with the lovely Eddie George, who lived in Bodmin in Cornwall, and had just retired as Governor of the Bank of England. He was just returning home from Hong Kong, where he had delivered a lecture on the future of the world economy for an exorbitant fee. Ensconced together for an hour as we departed London, I got the benefit of his thoughts for free.
From dawn, as the train enters Cornwall, the carriages resound to the sharp, metallic rap of the stewards giving passengers early morning alarm calls. As we stop at stations various – Plymouth, Liskard, Bodmin and Truro – passengers open the latch of their now well used cabins, extract themselves and their baggages and belongings, and shuffle, bleary eyed, along the corridor to the doors. The train spills its passengers onto the platforms, the doors shut noisily in a slam of percussion, and we head off again towards the last stop: Penzance. Threading through railway embankments, past gorse bushes with their tight, bright yellow flowers , scattering horses from their slumber with the noise of the engine, we huff and puff through the landscape of Cornwall until, at last, we emerge from our long night’s travel, to the coast and the magnificent sight of St. Michael’s Mount rising out of Mount’s Bay.
The train has slowed to a crawl now, tired and done for the day, and we limp, tired, into end of the line station. You can hear the sigh of the engine and the tic-tic-tic rhythm of the train as it stops and settles at journey’s end. All who remain, come to ground off the carriages and quietly move towards the taxis and town – home for some, holiday for others. Ready for rest. I always went straight to bed on getting home and straight to my room in London after arriving in Paddington – you need more sleep after the jolting and bumping journey. In truth, the train doesn’t deliver a great night’s sleep. It’s more the Dozer than the Sleeper service.
Often, for me, the night train was the start or end of a longer adventure, overseas. It started me on my way to Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore. Or west to America. Or south to Cape Town. Or north to Moscow. Or simply back home from all those distant lands. But whichever way I was travelling, once I got on board, adventure lay ahead. Either the adventure of new places and new people or of the glorious Cornish beaches and my two favourite people on the planet.
It may not be the Orient Express, but it’s a train you don’t want to miss.
