A Book of Railway Journeys Read online

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  About A Book of Railway Journeys

  About Ludovic Kennedy

  About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  For Alastair

  in the hope that he will come

  to enjoy trains as much

  as his father has.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  BRITAIN

  The first railway journey

  ANON

  The Nineteenth Century

  ROY FULLER

  For and against the railway train

  VARIOUS

  Liverpool to Manchester, 1830

  ANON

  Manchester to Liverpool, 1835

  CHARLES YOUNG

  From a Railway Carriage

  R. L. STEVENSON

  Lackadaisical attitude of early passengers

  W. M. ACWORTH

  From Marlborough to West Wales

  H. SANDHAM

  Brimstone fumes and Irish Mary

  REV. F. KILVERT

  Lord Gormanston’s Nanny

  ANON

  The Railway Junction

  WALTER DE LA MARE

  An English hobo

  ANON

  Midnight on the Great Western

  THOMAS HARDY

  A botanical specimen found on the Great Western

  ANON

  The Wasp

  JOHN DAVIDSON

  Escape of a murderer

  JOHN PENDLETON

  Uncertainty of place of birth

  ANON

  Travelling to my second marriage on the day of the first moonshot

  ROBERT NYE

  A lunatic at large

  RICHARD BENTLEY

  Cook’s first tour

  THOMAS COOK

  The Spiritual Railway

  ANON

  Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class

  JOHN BETJEMAN

  A writer’s odyssey

  NEVILLE CARDUS

  Adlestrop

  EDWARD THOMAS

  Mr. Dombey

  PATRICIA BEER

  On the Footplate:

  1. The Scotch Express

  STEPHEN CRANE

  Railway Note

  EDMUND BLUNDEN

  On the Footplate:

  2. The Flying Scotsman

  ERIC GILL

  Night Mail

  W. H. AUDEN

  The Boy in the Train

  M. C. SMITH

  A journey to school

  JAMES LEES-MILNE

  The Everlasting Percy

  E. V. KNOX

  The Whitsun Weddings

  PHILIP LARKIN

  EUROPE

  The Orient Express

  1. Inaugural journey

  MARTIN PAGE

  2. A royal engine driver

  MARTIN PAGE

  3. Lack of catering

  PAUL THEROUX

  Restaurant Car

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  4. A view from the window

  PAUL THEROUX

  To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

  FRANCIS CORNFORD

  The Fat White Woman Speaks

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  With Zola to visit Flaubert and Maupassant at Rouen

  E. AND J. GONCOURT

  Another visitor to Rouen

  WILLIAM MORRIS

  A Trip to Paris and Belgium

  D. G. ROSSETTI

  Dickens at Calais

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Lenin goes home

  EDMUND WILSON

  The Englishman abroad

  MARTIN PAGE

  Dawn

  RUPERT BROOKE

  Lord Curzon’s valet

  HAROLD NICOLSON

  Night train to Spain

  EDWARD HUTTON

  Courier’s train

  ANTHONY CARSON

  A mystery in Lapland

  TERRY GREENWOOD

  U.S.A.

  The DeWitt Clinton

  ROBERT N. WEBB

  Limited

  CARL SANDBURG

  Across the plains

  R. L. STEVENSON

  The City of New Orleans

  STEVE GOODMAN

  Dickens in America

  CHARLES DICKENS

  The Lackawanna Railroad

  STEPHEN GALE

  How they started

  1. Thomas Edison

  THOMAS EDISON

  2. George Pullman

  JERVIS ANDERSON

  Adventures of a hobo

  W. H. DAVIES

  Private varnish

  LUCIUS BEEBE

  This Train

  ANON

  The Making of the President 1968

  1. Bobby Kennedy returns to Washington

  THEODORE WHITE

  2. Nixon at Deshler

  THEODORE WHITE

  Mr. and Mrs. Pitman

  LUDOVIC KENNEDY

  The trains in Maine

  E. B. WHITE

  I like to see it lap the miles

  EMILY DICKINSON

  Wendy in Zen

  PAUL THEROUX

  The heart of the matter

  JOHN CHEEVER

  U.S.S.R.

  The Trans-Siberian Express

  1. Tsar Alexander gives the go-ahead

  2. The first train

  MARTIN PAGE

  3. The beginnings of Gulag—an early passenger remembers

  ANON

  4. An exchange of gifts

  ROGERS E. M. WHITAKER AND ANTHONY HISS

  5. The dining-car

  PETER FLEMING, MICHAEL PENNINGTON, PAUL THEROUX

  6. Some secret bridges

  ERIC NEWBY

  7. Some assorted drunks

  PAUL THEROUX

  8. The Red Army with its trousers down

  ERIC NEWBY

  9. A storm in Siberia

  ERIC NEWBY

  10. The Vostok

  ERIC NEWBY

  To a Locomotive in Winter

  WALT WHITMAN

  The ordeal of Gladys Aylward, missionary

  ALAN BURGESS

  Travelling to Samarkand

  1. Lord Curzon

  KENNETH ROSE

  2. Peter Fleming

  PETER FLEMING

  In the Gulag Archipelago

  1. Marie Avinov

  PAUL CHAVCHAVADZE

  2. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN 184

  ELSEWHERE

  India

  1. In the days of the Raj

  JAN MORRIS

  2. The Grand Trunk Express

  PAUL THEROUX

  Iran before the Ayahtollahs

  LUDOVIC KENNEDY

  An unusual death in Africa

  J. H. PATTERSON

  Australia

  1. Across the Outback

  MARK TWAIN

  2. The Ghan Express

  WILFRID THOMAS

  Out of the Window

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  A Chinese train

  W. H. AUDEN AND CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

  WAR

  Hitler’s train

  DAVID IRVING

  A London evacuee

  CHRISTOPHER LEACH

  The Final Solution

  SALA PAWLOWICZ WITH KEVIN KLOSE

  An escape in Canada

  KENDAL BURT AND JAMES LEASOR

  Troop Train

  KARL SHAPIRO

  Capture of an ammunition train

  PETER FLEMING

  An English girl in Hitler’s Germany


  CHRISTABEL BIELENBERG

  Kindness to a prisoner of war

  MILES REID

  The courage of Driver Gimbert

  ROGER LLOYD

  The Send-off

  WILFRED OWEN

  CRASHES

  Therapeutic benefits of a crash...

  ANON

  Social benefits of a crash...

  ANON

  Preventative measures in a crash...

  ANON

  A curious encounter between two John Perkins

  ANON

  George Alley

  ANON

  Dickens in danger

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Collision at Thorpe

  C. F. ADAMS

  The Ashtabula disaster, 1876

  C. F. ADAMS

  Casey Jones

  WALLACE SAUNDERS

  A crash in Palestine

  FREDERICK TREVES

  The Trans-Siberian takes a purler

  PETER FLEMING

  The Tay Bridge disaster

  A. J. CRONIN

  FICTION

  A cargo of cheeses

  JEROME K. JEROME

  The coming of the milk-girl

  MARCEL PROUST

  Faintheart in a Railway Train

  THOMAS HARDY

  Death of a hobo

  JOHN DOS PASSOS

  On the trail of the thief

  ERICH KASTNER

  Mr. Boot and Mr. Salter

  EVELYN WAUGH

  Train without driver

  EMILE ZOLA

  The Little Black Train

  KENNETH PATCHEN

  Holmes and Moriarty: The Final Problem

  A. CONAN DOYLE

  The very silent traveller

  PAUL TABORI

  The workman and the wet-nurse

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  Journey

  HAROLD MONRO

  Train to Johannesburg

  ALAN PATON

  The great race east

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  The story-teller

  SAKI

  Incident in August

  BRYAN MORGAN

  Ethel and Mr Salteena go to Rickamere Hall

  DAISY ASHFORD

  Love on the Orient Express

  GRAHAM GREENE

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  About A Book of Railway Journeys

  About Ludovic Kennedy

  About Christian Wolmar’s Railway Library

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Trains are on the way back; if not in substance, at least in the imagination. Mr. Paul Theroux may be said to have started the revival with The Great Railway Bazaar, a fascinating account of his travels by train from London to Tokyo and back. Recently in Paris the French staged a vast railway station exhibition, Le Temps des Gares; while in New York and London there have been revivals of the musical On the Twentieth Century based on America’s former crack express of the same name. The BBC has completed a seven-part series of television documentaries entitled Great Railway Journeys of the World, and Britain has also been celebrating the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. Illustrated descriptions of train journeys are now a feature of colour magazines; and railway clubs, private branch lines, special excursions, etc., are, I am told, all in rude health.

  For some of us, of course, trains never went away. My own affection for them began as a small boy when travelling to the Scottish Highlands for summer holidays before the war. Then, as now, the delight lay in the unaccustomed break with routine—the bustle of the terminus, porters jostling for the bags; stocking up with literature and chocolate at the platform stalls; then, settled in, the long, sweet wait for the whistle and the slow inching forward to the north. Dinner and a fitful sleep, and in the morning a bedside window on another world: deer on the hillside, wind on the heather, the heart of Scotland at my feet.

  Since then I have travelled in trains whenever possible. My favourite was the Terra Nova, the private car of the Governor of Newfoundland, whose private secretary and A.D.C. I once briefly was. The Governor and his wife slept in the car’s two bedrooms: in the drawing room-cum-observation car the butler and I slung hammocks from the roof. For official visits and fishing holidays the Terra Nova was hitched to the rear of the Newfoundland Express, which went at all of thirty miles an hour; and sustained by the Governor’s pink gins (for he was also an admiral) and by the butler’s pepper steaks (for he was also the cook) and the grandeur of the Newfoundland scenery, we pottered contentedly across the island to wherever duty or pleasure called.

  In the days when train travel was the norm, we were all rather inclined to take it for granted. After a thirty-year glut of jet and motorway travel, the novelty of which has long since worn off, we can see that train travel was—and when you can get it, still is—comparative bliss. No one who has travelled long distances on a motorway, chained like a dog to his seat, unable to read or drink, blocked by juggernauts from the passing view, deafened by their engines and blackened by their fumes, would wish to repeat the experience for pleasure.

  Air travel is little better. One is cramped and disorientated. Chains are de rigueur here too; and if you happen to find yourself next to a manic child or compulsive chatterbox, there is little you can do to escape. Airlines attempt to compensate for these deficiencies with piped music, films, and instant alcohol. These overload the system and, combined with a swingeing time-change, lead to total dysfunction; arriving within hours of setting out, one needs two days to recover.

  Train journeys, in comparison, have much to offer. Unlike sea or air travel, one has a fair notion where one is; and the countryside, like a moving picture show, unrolls itself before one’s eyes. One is transported in comfort, even style, to the wild places of earth—forest, mountain, desert; and always there is the counterpoint between life within the train and life without:

  One scene as I bow to pour her coffee:—

  Three Indians in the scouring drouth,

  huddled at a grave scooped in the gravel,

  lean to the wind as our train goes by.

  Someone is gone.

  There is dust on everything in Nevada.

  I pour the cream.*1

  One can move around in a train, visit the buffet for snacks or a drink, play cards (or, on some American trains, the piano), strike up a conversation, read, sleep, snore, make love. Luggage is to hand too, not as in car or airplane, ungetatable in trunk or belly.

  Some trains are designed to satisfy national needs. The American club car, for instance, exists for passengers to bore each other with accounts of business deals, marital problems, extramarital affairs: the price they know they must pay is to be bored in turn later. The English have never gone in for club cars, believing that on long journeys one should not utter at all. When buffet cars were first introduced to British trains, there was a real danger they might lead to social intercourse. Happily they turned out to be so utterly bereft of comfort and style, so perennially awash in soldiers and beer, as to discourage any right-thinking person from staying a moment longer than the time needed for his purchase, which he is then free to convey to the privacy and silence of his seat.

  Yet the sweetest pleasure of any long train journey lies in its anticipation. I have never eyed any long-distance train I was about to board (except perhaps in Britain) without wondering, as the old hymn says of Heaven,

  What joys await us there?

  What radiancy of glory?

  What bliss beyond compare?

  Even if achievement rarely matches promise, one may still day-dream. How green are the vistas, what’s for dinner, whom shall I meet? In the end it’s the passengers who provide the richest moments of any long-distance trip. For train travel, being constricted both in time and space, magnifies character, intensifies relationships, unites the disparate. Ordinary people become extra-ordinary, larger than life; and in the knowledge that they
will not meet again, expansive, confiding, intimate. Let us talk now, you and I: later will be too late.

  In the pages that follow, the reader will find many such brief encounters: the Rev. Francis Kilvert and Irish Mary; Harold Nicolson and Arketall; myself and Mr. and Mrs. Pitman; Christabel Bielenberg and the S.S. officer; Paul Theroux and Wendy. In the fiction section the meetings are even stranger: Myatt and Carol in Stamboul Train; the general and his companion in The Very Silent Traveller; the workman and the wet-nurse in Maupassant’s An Idyll. No wonder that trains are so often the setting for stories, for the essential stuff of stories—movement and relationships—is also the stuff of trains.