Maybe it's because I was a kid raised during the 50s and 60s, when steam trains were very common on Britain's railways and Dr.Beeching and subsequent Government spending cuts (from both Conservative and Labour) had not left the railways in the mess they now are, but I've always had a bit of a soft spot for train journeys. Thomas the Tank Engine probably helped as well......and it amazes me that those stories seem to be more popular than ever! My kids in the UK (all grown up now) were raised on them, mainly through the TV series' narrated initially by Ringo Starr and latterly by Michael Angelis.....my youngest John had pretty much all the Ladybird series books, all the videos, very nearly a complete set of toys and was able to follow the stories at bedtime to such an extent that at 2 he was able to correct me if I tried to miss out a bit (even though he was still not talking). Nowadays, Kuba and Ally are just as big fans, and watch it regularly on Polish TV (badly dubbed and with all the characters renamed to make more sense to Polish kids), and currently on Trinidadian TV where the dubbing is English but with mid-Western American accents (awful....the Fat Controller just doesn't sound right with a Chicago accent). They also have a massive and wonderful battery powered Thomas train set that covers the entire bedroom floor. And of course books and dvd's.
Anyway, my childhood was largely spent train spotting. I lived in a road that at the end of it had the main London to Lewes line running past, and at the station was a big and busy coal-yard, so there was always plenty to see. I spent hours in the fields watching the trains, both goods and passenger, passing by, scribbling down the locomotive numbers and names to cross off in my Ian Allan Trainspotters Book of Locomotives. Thankfully it never became an obsession in adulthood.....no standing in the rain on the end of platform 12 at Victoria Station in an anorak, writing down numbers, for me!....but it was exciting to the small boy. I can remember tank engines not dissimilar to Thomas himself (only black not blue) working busily in the coal yard and hauling goods trains through the station on the way to Lewes or London (or points in between); passenger trains, not quite expresses but not far short, hauled by powerful Battle of Britain class locomotives (like Gordon and Henry) with evocative names like Spitfire and Hurricane and Wellington; then there were the City class locos, similar to the Battle of Britain class but with streamlining around the boilers and carrying names like City of Truro, City of York and so on. We used to stand on a bridge over the railway, my friends and I, leaning over and watching the trains coming from miles away (obviously the plumes of steam were visible long before the train was), getting smothered in the smoke and steam as the trains passed under the bridge, to emerge coughing and spluttering and soot-marked. Great fun.
Somehow the diesel units that replaced the steam locomotives, more efficient though they may have been, never carried the same allure, and the later three-carriage diesel trains (the engine built into one of the carriages) were even worse....soulless but efficient people carriers, no more. The line was never electrified, and in fact traffic was drastically reduced and the coal-yard closed in the late 60s, so the electric trains, more efficient still and lacking anything in the way of a noisy engine that even the diesel trains had, never came to my home town. When locomotives largely disappeared from my locality so did my interest in train spotting.....checking off numbers of carriages never seemed worthwhile somehow....they lacked the glamour of even the lowliest six wheeled diesel shunter, never mind a snorting and powerful City of Truro.
* * *
When I started work, way back in 1970, I of course commuted by train to London. It was never a pleasure, crammed into a packed and uncomfortable train, full of tobacco smoke (all perfectly normal and acceptable then, and I added my own clouds to the fug) and filthy dirty. And diesels of course....by that time the cutbacks were taking hold, steam locomotives pretty much a thing of the past and services reducing in numbers, comfort and efficiency, as they did for many years. It was a means to an end, no more no less, and one I endured on and off for the next 30 years, on a variety of routes and in a variety of services (but all from Kent).
The only common factor throughout was that passenger numbers seemed to be growing....inevitably given population growth....even as spending cuts reduced, and in some places completely eliminated, services. Despite constantly rising fares and rising passenger numbers, British Rail was still losing money hand over fist. It made (and to me continues to make) no sense at all. I'm sure a lot of it was down to mis-management, by both BR employees and successive Transport Ministers and their Civil Servant armies who year-on-year seemed to reduce investment in the rail network in favour of building more and more roads, which in turn boosted traffic volumes, increased pollution and caused untold misery throughout Britain (and possibly contributed to the global warming we're all experiencing now). Standing in a crowded train for a couple of hours a day to get to and from work was not unusual for millions of people, me included, and we paid increasingly ridiculous prices to do so. Interest Free Season Ticket Loans became an increasingly common and valuable benefit on offer at any City firm when recruiting, and enabled you to save money by buying the cheapest annual ticket and defray the cost over a full year,with your employer's help. The Government, of course, decided it was a taxable benefit but with tickets costing over two grand last time I bought one (the best part of 15 years ago now, I admit) it was still worthwhile. I shudder to think how much they cost now.
So train travel was at the very least purgatory, if not Hell on Earth for most of us. Of course, the Iron Lady had an answer to that, as she did for everything, back in the 80s. She decided to break the British Rail monopoly by breaking up the company, setting up one company (Railtrack) to manage and maintain the track network and throw open the service provision to any company who wanted to bid for a chunk of it. Apart from raising shit loads on money for the Government's coffers, and encourage more people to join the share owning democracy she was creating, much of it by privatising other former national, Government-owned industries (like the Post Office, British Telecom, and other utilities), the idea was that more competition would force companies to be more efficient and offer a better service and lower cost to the consumer. It was all bollocks, of course. It happened, as she had planned: but instead of improving services if anything things got worse, with a hotch-potch of train operators, many foreign owned and not competent to run a train set, never mind a train network, operating on a track network that was increasingly out of date and whose operator, Railtrack, was unable to maintain because they were basically skint on account of Government investment virtually disappearing. There were many fatal crashes on badly maintained track in badly maintained and old fashioned rolling stock. It was indeed sad to see a once leading industry, not only in the UK but globally, reduced to a laughing stock.
The trend has been reversed over recent years, private investment has been increased, Government subsidy increased, the whole untidy infrastructure somewhat streamlined (although there is still no single company like British Rail) and things are improving. Rolling stock is much more modern and, generally, cleaner and more comfortable, the service levels seem to be improving although at an increasing cost, and it does seem to be safer......train build quality has improved with new technology, which has also led to improvements in signalling and traffic monitoring. There is continual maintenance work on the track network; on any given weekend miles of lines are closed for repair or upgrade, with trains replaced by bus services making travel a bit of a nightmare. Passenger numbers tailed off but seem to be recovering, but ticket costs continue to go stratospheric...although if you're prepared and able to book well in advance and on-line with credit card payment you can make big savings: turn up at the ticket office and expect to travel today (or in a few minutes) and you will pay through the nose.
But I can't see rail travel in the UK ever getting back to levels of the old BR glory years, pre-Beeching.
* * *
I didn't hit continental railways until the mid 90s, By then I was working for a German bank and spent a couple of weekends in Frankfurt. One wet October weekend, to escape the unwanted attentions of a nymphomanic helga with a bad case on acne and halitosis I spent the Saturday cruising around the city and its suburbs on the S-bahn (the equivalent of the Tube). I was staying in a really poor hotel in a town some 20km outside in the Taunus.....the Frankfurt book fair was on so there were no rooms available in the city itself....that had been booked by a colleague who lived nearby. God, it was awful! I had a room to myself, sleeping on a hard plywood bed. There was no TV, my sole entertainment being a cheap and nasty clock-radio, and the only station worth listening to was the American Forces network (that actually played some really good music). The toilet and shower were shared by everyone else on that floor, and as a result were vile and filthy. My fellow guests were entirely Turkish itinerent workers, employed building extensions to the airport terminal and the office blocks that were springing up all over the city. It was a dreadful two weeks spent there.
But on this Saturday, I caught several trains in and around the city, and all except one were clean and comfortable, but even that one ran to timetable. The exception was a football special. In a bar at lunchtime, eating sausage and potato salad and drinking a cold beer, I heard that the locals, Eintracht Frankfurt, were at home to St.Pauli from Hamburg, so I figured I'd take a look. I boarded a train for the stadium, which is one of the more attractive grounds I've been to, being situated in the middle of a pine forest midway between the city and the airport (it's completely different now, having been totally rebuilt for the German World Cup in 2006). We pulled into the Hauptbahnhof, and the train, already full (I was standing by a door) became packed, as several hundred mostly drunken St.Pauli fans piled in, accompanied by several armed police with hungry looking rottweilers and dobermans. I was penned in by about a dozen fans and a cop whose dog spent the entire ride looking at me and dribbling.....I think he was hungry....while the St.Pauli fans bellowed "You'll Never Walk Alone" (the Liverpool club anthem) in thickly accented English. At Sportfeld, the station for the ground, I managed to slip away as all the visiting fans were led into a holding pen, from where they were later escorted by the same cops and dogs to a single enclosure behind one of the goals. The match was good, I got a seat in one of the stands for DM10 (not sure what that was in English but very cheap), and watched Frankfurt come back from two down at half time to earn a draw, thanks to a brace by the legendary and at that time unknown 18 year old Nigerian J.J.Okocha.....what a fabulous player!
I've travelled on German trains a few times since then, and they remain comfortable and on time.
* * *
A couple of years and a job change later I got my introduction to the then brand spanking new Eurostar services. The tunnel had been open to freight and car transports for a while, but there were the inevitable delays in completing the London terminus at Waterloo and even longer delays building the high-speed line through south east London (one of the busiest and most congested areas for travel, by road or rail, in the entire country) and Kent to the tunnel entrance at Folkestone. Partly this was down to a typical example of British bureaucracy and railways mis-management. When the original route planning was going on, the senior Civil Servants, Transport Ministers and railway managers pored over a large scale map of Kent and basically drew a line to mark the shortest route, avoiding the larger towns like Ashford and Maidstone and Gravesend. This was duly announced and construction work started. Then there was much scratching of heads as they were inundated by complaints from people living in villages like New Barn and Istead Rise and New Ash Green......villages that weren't on the map they had used. It turned out the map was 30 years old, and the villages were less than 20 years old. It sounds incedible that there could be such incompetence, but I got the story from an impeccable source.....I was one of many who wrote complaint letters to our local MPs throughout Kent, and for some reason mine struck a chord and I was invited to the House of Commons to meet mine. Over tea and biscuits in one of the cafeterias he related it to me, and assured me that he would do his best to ensure I wasn't affected (and he was good to his word: when the track was eventually finished it was 10 miles from home).
Anyway, my initial trip was from Waterloo to Paris, accompanying my company's CEO to a meeting. We travelled Business Class (which was basically Standard Class with slightly bigger seats and more leg room), and we had one end of the carriage to ourselves. I settled down to enjoy the ride, while William spread files and papers all across half the seats and started poring over them. By the time we reached Elephant & Castle, ambling slowly along suburban lines totaly unsuited to high speed trains, he suddenly realised I wasn't doing anything except gaze out of the window. He frowned.
"Not working?" he said.
"Sure," I said. "I'm preparing for the meeting. Thinking."
"Fine," he said, and returned to his papers. He never uttered another sound all the way to Paris.
I meanwhile enjoyed the ride. It was tortuously slow, crawling through the Kentish countryside no faster than the normal commuter services (we were probably stuck behind them all the way to Folkestone), then as we dipped into the tunnel an increased whine from the power car next door was the only way of knowing we were accelerating. Twenty minutes later we shot out into the sunny French countryside, close to Calais, going at maybe three times the pace, and continued thus all the way to Gare du Nord. At one point, about 30 minutes later, the driver announced over the PA that we had reached "...our optimum operating speed of 300kph". You wouldn't have known it.....the ride was smooth and comfortable and almost silent.
On the return journey (the meeting was successful but my preparation had been wasted, as beyond introducing myself I contributed not a word) that evening, the difference between the French side and the British side was even more pronounced....this time we roared into the Tunnel at well over 100 kph but by the time we came out at Folkestone we had slowed, again imperceptibly, to local commuter train pace....that is, very slow. The ride into London, less mileage than between Calais and Paris, took nearly twice as long and we were 20 minutes late arriving at Waterloo (as opposed to our on-time arrival that morning in Paris).
Over the following 12 months or so, I made many return trips to Paris, as our first meeting resulted in a co-operative partnership agreement being signed, perhaps two or three days a week. I took to driving 30 minutes to Ashford and catching the train there, as it was quicker (my wife was less than pleased as it meant she didn't have the car for those days). Throughout those months the journey times didn't vary much: on time arrival in Paris, but late back to Ashford or Waterloo. The high speed link between Paris and the Tunnel had been completed before the Tunnel itself opened, whereas on our side construction was held up for years in various public enquiries, Government committees and court cases. Eventually construction started and years more passed before it was finished. In fact it only opened for business fully last year, and I made my first trip on it in April this year.
But I'm getting ahead of myself....
* * *
My trips on Eurostar and the German railways showed me that one of the more attractive benefits of EU membership was easier access to the European rail network, so I tried to make use of it as and when I could. A few months after my London-Paris co-operation started I had to do a trip to Brussels and Amsterdam to meet potential investors, and decided to use the trains to save costs. So I caught the Eurostar from Ashford to Brussels one morning and found myself in the Belgian capital quicker than I would have been in London on a normal commute in the opposite direction. I had a half hour wait in a comfortable and reasonably priced station cafe, then caught a connection to Amsterdam via Antwerp, Rotterdam and The Hague. It was a typical European train: big solid carriages with comfortable seats, plenty of legroom and a restaurant car, hauled by an impressively sized diesel-electric locomotive. We stopped for 15 minutes in Antwerp while the driver walked from the locomotive to the driver's cab at the other end of the train, before heading off again through the flat Belgian and Dutch countryside. The trip took a little over three hours. Halfway there William phoned and wanted to know where I was, and was not happy when I told him I was on a train. He told me he was faxing a document to my hotel and expected me to read it and comment on it by tomorrow evening. The document was 80 pages, so that was my evening touring the Red Light district out of the window.
But the train journeys themselves, despite William's best efforts, were very enjoyable, and the Belgian beer in the restaurant car on the return trip very good and very cheap. All in all, a very civilized way to travel, I decided....must do it more often.
* * *
But I didn't, at least not for a couple of years.
By then, I had changed jobs, my marriage had broken up and I had moved to Poland to work on a project in Warsaw. At that time I was only expecting to be there a couple of months but I've been there ever since. In the first summer I was there, in 2001, I decided to visit the Baltic coast as I'd been told it was worth doing. I asked around for a few recommendations and decided to take the easiest option and head to Gdynia (home of the Solidarity movement that was instrumental in bringing down Communism in the early 80s, a revolution that spread like wildfire and ultimately brought down the entire Soviet Union and its eastern European empire). One of the secretaries in the office (now my wife......although that was never in either of our minds then) helped me out by booking the train tickets and finding me a room in a cheap hotel in Gdynia.
I caught an Intercity Express one Friday afternoon from Warsaw Central station. It's a massive station, a monument to Russian-era government, built mostly underground but with a massive grey concrete ticket hall above ground, right next to the Palace of Culture (which looks like the tower in the first Ghostbusters movie, a massive 40-odd storey monstrosity, all gabled corners and spires balanced on top of a network of concert halls, with a viewing platform at the top - a gift from Stalin apparently. I've since seen smaller copies of it in Sofia and Bucharest....the bloke had no taste in architecture at all). I'm told the station was built and paid for by Moscow, on condition it was finished in time for Brezhnev's presidential train to be the first arrival at the start of a planned visit the following year (in the early1970s). Sure enough that's how it happened, although there was a strong smell of fresh paint on the platforms, and the painters who were putting the finishing touches to their work had to be hidden from Brezhnev's eyes, to be brought out to finish after he had left the station.
Anyway, I travelled First Class, and had a compartment to myself. It was comfortable enough, the carriages were big and solid, very similar to those on my Brussels - Amsterdam ride, only much shabbier and in need of a good clean. I took a walk along to the bar car for a beer, and passed through a couple of crowded, smoky and even shabbier second class carriages, and was glad I'd paid extra for my First Class ticket. But the train ran to timetable, and the ride through the central Polish plains to the coast was very good....it's a big and beautiful country. The huge, red-brick 14th century Teutonic Knights castle at Malbork, perched on the river bank close to the station, was particularly impressive. We got to Gdynia about 10 in the evening (it's a 6 hour ride) and the hostel I was staying in was just around the corner from the station and was comfortable and cheap. The next day I explored the port area of Gdynia and spent an enjoyable couple of hours sitting at a beach bar, drinking cold Lech beer and watching a couple of beach volleyball games featuring stunningly attractive local girls not wearing very much, and getting a bit sunburned.
The next day I decided to to move on, and caught a local branch line train to Hel. The Hel peninsula, to the north of Gdynia and to the far east of the country's seaboard, is a 30km long spit of sand jutting out into the Baltic. In places it's only a couple of hundred yards across, at others maybe a mile, and along its length are half a dozen villages that used to be quiet fishing villages but are now increasingly popular holiday resorts, where kite surfing is very popular. Down the centre of the peninsula, with pine forest to either side between these villages, runs the road and parallel to it the branch line to Hel. You could walk from one end to the other and back in a day. The local train I caught there was only three carriages, all second class, and hauled by a massive diesel locomotive (the branch to Hel, unlike the rest of the network, is not electrified).
I had a nice day. I got off the train at a pretty little port called Wladyslawowo, and strolled alongside the track as far as Chalupy, the next village along (perhaps 3 miles). Now and then I'd leave the track, at one side or the other, and the comforting shade of the trees, and head to the beach. It was a hot July weekend with temperatures close to 30C so they were crowded with holiday makers and day trippers. To the north, the Baltic side, the sea was quite rough and a strong cooling breeze was blowing from off-shore. The sea was cold (but no more so than the English channel) but with temperatures at that level it was refreshing. The inland side, facing the Bay of Gdynia, was more sheltered, from the sea-breeze by the woods and from the strong surf by the peninsula itself. The beaches were generally much smaller, much less crowded (and in some places deserted) and less developed, sloping gently into a sea that was calm, shallow and several degrees warmer. All the beaches, on both sides, were sandy.....since then I've been to many beaches as far west as the German border and never seen a pebble....and well maintained. Every few hundred yards, on either side of the villages dotted along the coast, are little beach bars selling local and international beers, good Polish food and some of the best ice-cream I've eaten anywhere in the world.
I had to run for my train back to Gdynia, nearly missed it, and had I done so I would have had a problem as I would have missed my connection to the day's last train back to Warsaw. But I made it ok, and got home to my apartment in Warsaw just before midnight, tired, a bit sore from the sun but very happy.
Over the years, I've used the Polish rail system many times: at least once a year on the coast run (not only to Gdynia but further afield, to Koszalin and Kolobrzeg, resorts to the centre and west of the country, and once on a good and comfortable sleeper service through Poznan to a resort called Miedzezdroje, a few miles from the German border at Swinojuscie, in turn a couple of miles from the old Nazi rocket weapons station at Peenemunde), a few times down to the old capital city of Krakow, as well as local services around Warsaw including a little narrow-gauge branch out to Milanowek, where my wife's family live. The trains though old and tatty are comfortable enough and rarely late, and since the country was admitted to the EU there have been many improvements - a good portion of infrastructure funding has gone towards re-furbishing or replacing a lot of rolling stock, as well as track and signalling improvements. Fares too, whilst increasing, still represent excellent value in comparison with the UK: a couple of years ago, working in Krakow for a couple of months, my weekly First Class return ticket, purchased over the counter the day before travel, cost me PLN120 (that's around GBP25)....for a two hour, 250-odd kilometre journey. Would an equivalent trip in Britain, under the same purchase conditions (say London - Birmingham or Bristol) be as cheap? No.
I have to say I'm quite a fan of Polish railways.
* * *
But my favourite network is without question Switzerland.
I've never used any of the scenic special routes through the more beautiful Alpine regions (though having seen pictures and read reviews I'd love to do so), my experiences being limited to the areas in and around Zurich and Geneva, where I've done quite a bit of work over the last few years. But that has been enough to make me feel it's possibly the best railway network in Europe.
For a start, how can a railway that runs through some of the prettiest and most spectacular scenery in Europe not be good? Wherever you are in Switzerland you're never far from a breathtakingly beautiful view of a mountain, or a crystal clear lake surrounded by chocolate-box villages, and often by both. The country is so beautiful it can get boring at times. Then, being Swiss, the network is unfailingly efficient. Trains run strictly to timetable - as good as the Germans and Poles tend to be with their punctuality, Switzerland is the only place I've been to where the train starts to move as the countdown to departure on the platform clock (or the one in the carriage) clicks over to 0:00. Never a platform change, either.....except once, when a derailment just outside Zurich Hauptbahnhof caused rush-hour chaos for half an hour or so. As an Englishman used to late and probably unannounced platform changes (thus used to keeping an eye on departure boards) it was more normal than being on time from the usual platform, so it made no difference to me. But watching Swiss bankers arriving at platform 15, reading their papers, or mails on their Blackberries or whatever, a couple of minutes before their normal departure time, only to find no train there, instead an announcement telling them to go to platform 1 was priceless. Total panic, mystification and anger.....hilarious.
The trains are comfortable too. Many of them are double-deckers, so a seat on the top deck makes an already spectacular view even better. The seats are often recliners, with arm and footrests, and there is sufficient space between them to make use of the facility without pissing off the person behind or opposite. Some carriages, instead of the usual pairs of seats facing each other as is normal everywhere, have seats at the ends of the compartment arranged like settees in a little semi-circle around a couple of small coffee tables. All of the carriages have plenty of power points so that the more conscientious can plug in their laptops and work, whilst others are labelled QuietCars, where mobile phone and iPod use are banned - silence is golden, have a good kip.
And that is all true for both First and Second Class travel (basically, First Class differs in that the seats offer a little more leg room and padding for comfort).
So travel on Swiss Railways really is a pleasure.
* * *
For some time, I worked on a project in Zurich. The office was actually in a suburb called Horgen, a 20 minute train ride along the western shore of the Zurichsee (the lake), so I did a reverse commute every day. The trains were nearly empty, and the views, once you were out of the city itself, lovely. The track runs alongside the lake, often literally on the banks so that you look down from the top deck window into crystal clear lake water instead of someone's back garden or bedroom. Across on the opposite shore there are villages and towns scattered along, many of them very wealthy where people like David Bowie, Tina Turner and Phil Collins live. Behind them rear the mountains - not the highest in Switzerland by any stretch, but impressive nonetheless. On the other side of the train, as you pass through the west bank towns and villages, are equally impressive hills and mountains. It was a lovely commute. The line continues along the entire lake-shore to the southern end, and a place called Pfaeffikon SZ, maybe another half an hour's run after Horgen. It's a typically pretty little Swiss small town, nestling at the base of a mountain, where you can take a walk up into them on warm sunny days, through steep Alpine meadows where cattle with big bells round their necks wander happily. A nice place.
Here too a single track line crosses a bridge over the tip of the lake to the opposite shore and the equally pretty town of Rapperswill. My wife came to visit me once and we took this train and had a very pleasant afternoon exploring the two towns. Rapperswill is one of the prettiest places I've been to, although the cafes there were absurdly expensive. On one of the upper levels (Rapperswill is built in terraces on the side of a quite steep lakeside hill) we to our surprise came across a Polish Military Museum. It was closed, and we've never been back, so I have no idea what it's like or how a little Swiss town came to have it there.
* * *
A couple of years ago, I spent six months working in Geneva. Because of the vagaries of airline timetables, it meant my Monday morning flight had to be to Zurich, from where I caught a train to Geneva - this got me to work an hour or so before the day's direct Warsaw - Geneva flight would otherwise have done. My First Class ticket cost me CHF80 (about fifty quid) and was well worth it.
There are two routes from Zurich to Geneva. Both take you out through a largely agricultural and hence less mountainous plain as far as Olten where the line splits. One route, the more northerly, takes you through Solothurn, Biel-Bienne and along the shores of Lake Neuchatel, through the town to Yverdon-les-Bains at the lake's westerly tip, then down through Nyon and along the lakeshore there to Geneva. It's a nice ride, especially the parts along the lake shores, and the trains are a very comfortable inter-city express, not dissimilar to the Eurostar stock.
I tended to take the slightly longer and slower southerly route, on my favourite double-deckers, through Berne, Friburg, and Lausanne, where the track merges with that through Neuchatel for the last miles through Nyon to Geneva. It's a prettier ride, the country is more hilly rising beyond Berne to mountainous, and there is more to see. My favourite point was between Romont and Lausanne: here you are climbing towards a quite high moutain spur, and into a tunnel. It takes perhaps five minutes to go through, and you emerge suddenly above the western suburbs of Montreux. If you're sitting on the left hand-side of the train (and of course on the upper deck) the view is quite stunning, especially on a sunny clear day. Below you is virtually the whole of Lake Geneva stretched out before you, with the city just visible on your forward horizon (the only bit you can't see is the eastern end, where lies Montreux, which is now behind you). From the high level track down to the lakeside is terrace upon terrace of grape vine, dotted with little stone cottages here and there. The train goes along and down the hillside through these vineyards into the pretty lakeside town of Lausanne, and from there along the lakeshore itself through Nyon (and UEFA Headquarters with its network of floodlit football pitches) to Geneva. On the opposite shore, all along the lakeside, are mountains, some of the higher areas starting at this part of the country, and close to Lausanne you can look across to Mont Blanc. It is a beautiful half an hour or so's journey, and I always enjoyed it. A few times, especially earlier in the year (I was there from January to July), the peaks across the lake were wreathed in clouds, and at others, in the spring when the weather was improving but still cold, the sun reflecting off the snow capped peaks dazzled my eyes.
So Switzerland is good too.
* * *
I wrote earlier that one of the best things to come out of the EU was the availability of rail tickets the length and breadth of the Continent, often with one ticket. Nothing illustrates the point better than my last yarn.....nor about why Britian is still an also ran when it comes to rail transport (and will remain so unless and until there is a seismic shift in Government policy).
In April this year I set out to travel from Warsaw to Trinidad to start on a new project. The proposed journey was a bit arduous (a 5.a.m. start to fly BA from Warsaw to Heathrow, a 3 hour wait then American Airlines to JFK, another 4 hours' connection time then Caribbean airlines to Port of Spain.....total travel time came to over 24 hours), but that turned out to be the easy part.
We landed at Heathrow on a beautiful warm sunny spring Thursday morning, not a cloud in the sky. I got out of the plane at Terminal 5, and headed off to get my bus across to T3 for my connection. At the top of the stairs to the bus stop was a sign "All flights cancelled from 12:00....airport closed". Three BA ground staff were having a chat nearby, so I asked what as going on. It was now about half nine. "Haven't you heard about the volcano?" they said.
That was the first news I had of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name. My flight was scheduled for 12:30, so was already cancelled. I went to T3 and the American Airlines desk, and after a half hour queueing spoke to a very helpful check-in girl who booked me on a flight the following morning for Miami, and a connection on AA to Port of Spain. I headed for baggage reclaim to get my bag (assured it had been forwarded from T5 already) and while I was waiting called my travel people to get a room for the night. They had problems but managed to find me one at an airport hotel, but I had a to wait another 4 hours, return to T5 and queue for another hour before getting my bag. It was the start of a weird few days.
The ash cloud drifitng down over the British Isles (and eventually most of north western Europe) caused the cancellation of my Miami flight and I found that out that evening in the hotel. Another call got me a seat on a BA flight direct to Trinidad, departing on Saturday morning, but from Gatwick, so the next day I caught a coach to London's second airport. I checked into my hotel there, the Sofitel in the South Terminal, and strolled across to the Departure Hall to see what was happening. It was strange to see the massive and usually crowded terminal deserted. At the BA desk I was told that my flight was "highly unlikely" to go, but I should check later. Within a couple of hours that had changed to defnitely no flight, so while I sat in an otherwise empty bar having a beer and a sandwich I called the PM to tell him I wasn't going to make it. We agreed to cancel the trip, so it then became a question of getting home.
My travel bureau in Athens were unhelpful.....they did not have access to Eurorail to book trains (odd, since it's a public website) so I told them not to worry. I spent a couple of hours trying to get through to Eurorail to make my own booking, but couldn't get through, so called my company's London travel bureau. They were closed but the emergency staff promised a call back tomorrow (Sunday).
Rather than spend another day at an empty airport, I caught the train to Brighton on the Sunday morning. It was a lovely warm sunny day, and the day of the first ever Brighton Marathon, so I had a cracking day relaxing on the beach and getting an early start to my suntan. While I was lying there the travel people called, and I explained the problem.....basically I don't care how you do it, but get me home to Warsaw. Within an hour I had a call back, confirming they could get me on the 11:00 Eurostar to Brussels on Tuesday. From there I could get a train to Cologne, and there connect to a sleeper service to Warsaw, arriving Wednesday mid morning. I accepted the proposition, and in 10 minutes a further call confirmed my Eurostar booking.
But here's the part where Britain lags behind. They were unable to book the entire trip on a single ticket. They could get me to Brussels ok, but from there I was on my own. I had no option but to accept, and hope I'd be able to sort something out once I was in Belgium. The travel people sent me a mail with all the train details, so the next day, Monday, I caught a train to Gravesend, where I met up with a couple of my kids for a beer, and from there back up to London to meet my third son, who lives at Greenwich and was putting me up for the night to make sure I could get to St.Pancras for my Eurostar.
* * *
The trip was actually quite fun, the worst part being the Tube from Surrey Quays to St.Pancras.....the London Underground may be pretty good, but the station layouts, especially on intersection stations where different lines operate at different levels linked by steps or escalators (but rarely lifts) aren't exactly baggage friendly.
The new Eurostar terminal at St.Pancras was ok, the staff very helpful when it came to retrieving my pre-paid ticket from the automated ticket machine, but I was surprised at the amount of security. When I had used the service before it was pretty much turn up at the station, go through the barrier with your ticket and get on the train, like any other station in Britian. 9/11 clearly changed all that: at St.Pancras you now go through a security barrier identical to those at airports the world over and then wait in a central waiting room until your train is called. But the train itself was fine. Although the best part of 10 years old now, the carriages were clean and comfortable, packed with people like me trying to get home or continue volcano interrupted journeys. At least the train now went at its proper speed - the long awaited high speed line through Kent makes a huge difference. We reached Folkestone and the Tunnel in 30 minutes (on my first trip it had taken that long to clear suburban London) and Brussels in about an hour and a half.
Buying my onward ticket proved easy enough, after an hour in the queue. The ticket salesman spoke better English than a lot of English peeople I know, and was able to confirm my ticket for Cologne and reserve me a bunk on the sleeper to Warsaw. The cost was around EUR200.....less than my Eurostar ticket, and there is another reason why Britain lags behind. Shorn of Government subsidy the train operators have to keep their ticket prices high to avoid losing money so cannot compete with more heavily subsidized Continental networks.
I had no seat guarantee for my Thalys express service to Cologne, but was allocated Car 9. When the train came in (it had originated in Paris) it was packed. I wedged myself in with about 30 other people and our baggage and hoped for the best. As we pulled out of Brussels and picked up speed (this was a TGV-style high speed train) I remember thinking that if there was an accident I would be dead. The journey was about an hour and a half, via Aachen, and was reasonably painless. The stop at Aachen, just over the German border, was a bit of a pain as a number of us had to get out, bags and all, to let out other passengers including one American guy with a bike.
At Cologne I had a couple of hours to wait before the sleeper arrived. I found I had a centre bunk, but it was comfortable enough (even if I risked concussion getting in and out) and I actually slept pretty well. And this train really illustrates the advantages on the Continental rail network, and the way so many different countries (except of course the UK) co-operate. The train originated in Amstrerdam. After Cologne, it went via Dortmund, Bremen and Hamburg across the Danish border to Copenhagen. There it stopped for a while, probably to change locomotives and crew, before heading back to Germany through Hamburg and Rostock to its next stop in Berlin. Then it crossed the border into Poland and went via Poznan to Warsaw, arriving about 11:00 a.m. I missed most of the journey because as a night train I slept, and it's a shame becuase I would have enjoyed that. But that isn't the end of the journey. At Warsaw the train splits in half. One portion heads off south west, through Wroclaw to Prague in the Czech Republic, while the rest heads off easterly through Brest-Litovsk in Belorus and on all the way to Moscow.
It's not quite the Orient Express or the Trans-Siberian but Amsterdam to Moscow via Germany and Denmark and Poland.....what an excellent trip that must be!
Addendum 19 October 2010: I see that Deutsche Bahn is planning to introduce new ICE services from London St.Pancras to Brussels, Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt early in 2012. Journey time to Amsterdam is projected to be 4 hours, and Frankfurt 5. Can't wait to give that one a whirl.....I've been on ICE trains before, they are brilliant. And it's great that at long last Britian seems to be joining the party.
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