MISS THE PAIN; TAKE THE TRAIN

THIRTY YEARS OF THE EUROSTAR

It’s ironic that the thirty-year anniversary of the opening of the Channel Tunnel should take place just as Brexit Britain gnaws on the  ties that bind it to Europe.  Customs duty is already being levied on items brought there, so perhaps it won’t be long before they’ll demand a tourist tax to set foot on Britain’s green and pleasant land.

Fortunately, the Chunnel’s most useful feature, the Eurostar, looks to be here to stay. It’s second nature now to take a seat at Gare du Nord and alight at London St Pancras a little over two hours later (only one hour, according to UK clocks, since they’re in a different zone). Did we really once spend half an hour on the train to Roissy, an hour or more going through Security, only to land at Heathrow after a forty minute flight and waste another hour on the train into central London?

Not that there haven’t been glitches. I was unlucky enough to be on a train early in the service which revealed a catastrophic design flaw. Racing through the home counties in the dead of winter, the engine collected a mass of snow and ice which, as we entered the much warmer tunnel, began to melt. Water trickled into the electrical wiring that ran between rails, and something fused.  Amidst a smell of burning insulation, the train stopped dead, and with it all lighting and heating. It took hours in the cold and dark to tow us out, and, after that, to find other trains to get us to Paris – all at 3am, and in a snowstorm. I like to think that some passengers may have exploited the situation to explore earth-bound variations on the Mile High Club - but of course most were British, and such things are Just Not Done.

This, I suppose, is where the modern railroad disappoints. No Train Bleu on Eurostar, with madonnas des sleepings whiling away the hours as their clients lost or won the fortune that would pay them. One can’t imagine a Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint flirting as their train plunges suggestively into a tunnel, nor Miss Froy writing her name in a steamed-up window, or Holmes and Watson taking the night train from Waterloo en route to a rendezvous with the hound of the Baskervilles. No tea and cucumber sandwiches on the 4.12 from Liverpool Street. In the dining car that little more than a coffee bar, Romance and Mystery are no longer on the menu.

In the ‘sixties, Richard Beeching, Chairman of the British Railways Board, closed hundreds of little-used rural stations and tore up thousands of miles of track. We of a railway turn of mind regard this as one of the great cultural offences of the century. The duo of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann incorporated our regret into a song. It’s called Slow Train.

I once talked trains with the director Michael Powell, a fellow enthusiast. He had the happiest memories of his first trans-America journey on the Super Chief, just after World War II, with his partner Emeric Pressburger. "Fritz Lang was on the train. We had never met him but he came along and introduced himself. We had a drawing room, so we spent most of the three days telling stories and cracking jokes with Lang, who was a lovely person. We were going through marvellous places like Albuquerque and Santa Fe. No, my dear fellow - it's the only way to travel." Indeed it is.