I seem to have spent an inordinate time travelling on railways in recent weeks. Not that this bothers me in the slightest: those who are familiar with me will know that this is my preferred mode of transport. Some people see a train as merely a means of getting from A to B, but for me, jumping on a train, however long the journey, instils a sense of adventure. Some may find the prospect of a long train journey daunting, even intimidating, but rail travel invariably provides me with a sense of freedom and relaxation that no other form of travel gives. Unlike a flight where - to all intents and purposes – you step out of one time warp into the next, the train journey delivers you to your destination across a seamlessly overlapping but ever-changing succession of landscapes and cultures.
I can’t
pinpoint an exact moment in time when my weakness for trains was germinated.
It could
have been the thrill of boarding a train hauled by Britannia class 70026
(‘Polar Star’) to our family's holiday destination on the North Wales coast, or perhaps
standing on the parapet of a bridge on my way home from school with my head in
a cloud of smoke billowing from a Class 9F Crosti-Boiler as it passed underneath. It probably
didn’t help that I had a wider family fuelled with the same enthusiasm. At
Christmas, my elder cousins would appear with their ‘Combined Volumes’
comparing the locos they’d copped on their trainspotting outings. My parents
would even take us on rail excursions, on one occasion as far north as Kyle of
Lochalsh. So my predilection for things on rails was sealed at an early age.
It’s not
even as if I’m a habitual user of trains, but when I’m in a certain state of
mind, I can fantasise about rail travel in much the same way as a person
consumed by a craving for chocolate can hanker after a truffle. And if I’m not
dreaming about trains, after half a century of travelling on them, I can look
back on some fulfilling journeys. Like the childhood excitement of being pulled by
Polar Star, some of my most memorable moments have taken place on trains or in
railway stations. I’d say seeing the Matterhorn
loom into view as the Brig-Visp-Zermatt train reaches its destination at the
head of the valley is pretty high on the list. Sharing a journey with a
crate-load of durians on the ‘jungle line’ from Kota Bahru to Kuala Lumpur runs it close. So too the crossing of the mighty St Lawrence
into Montreal after being hauled up the Hudson valley through the Adirondacks into Quebec. Just three of many.
One of the
great things about trains is that you can read, sleep, take a meal or enjoy a
beer in the buffet car, engage in conversation with complete strangers, or
just simply stare out of the window at the changing scenery. Rail travel is
particularly conducive to reading, and if you can combine it with books about
rail travel, then even better! One of my greatest pleasures was reading Paul
Theroux’s wonderful Old Patagonian Express on an interrailing trip down to the
south of Italy
and back.
For my last birthday, I was given a copy of Italian Ways by Tim Parks, which bears the subtitle On and
Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo. I think the friend who
gave me the present had tipped Tim Parks off beforehand, because it’s a book
that could have been written specifically with me in mind. Ever since my early
twenties, when I was studying Geography at university, on and off, for work and
pleasure, I’ve been travelling the Ferrovie dello Stato. For someone arriving at
Milan’s magnificent
Central Station for the first time, the significant role that railways play in
Italian culture is plain to see. The Italian rail network runs to 24,000 kilometres
and, after Germany (which
has 41,000 km),
it has the highest density of track in Europe.
After the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy
in 1861, ambitious plans were put in place to link the Alps to Sicily by rail to
connect the hitherto divided peninsular.
Parks is an
English writer and novelist who has lived in Northern
Italy since 1981 and who has been writing about his adopted
country on and off for much of that period. With Italian Ways he attempts to describe Italy through
the windows of a train, travelling the peninsula from top to toe. He does so by
making use of all categories of train, from regional trains and interregional
trains to the high-speed Freccia Rossa. As the jacket on the book states: through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians – conductors and ticket
collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and
immigrants – Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive.
On my first
visit to Italy
I recall how passengers walked across the track at stations despite the
omnipresent Vietato attraversare i binari
signs. 35 years later, they are still doing it. The 1970s and the early 1980s
had been a turbulent time in Italian politics with many radical groups on the
left and right committing terrorist atrocities, such as the bombing at Bologna railway station
which killed 85 and wounded a further 200. Bomb scares were common in the
eighties and on that same interrailing trip our train got stuck for two hours
in the baking heat of Calabria
at the small station of Nocera Terinese after a warning of a possible bomb on
the line ahead. The town’s gelataio, who’d got wind of the delay and had turned up pronto at the station with his ice-cream cart, made
a pretty penny that day, whilst passengers seemed totally unfazed by the hold-up.
Excited yet unflappable, the Italians simply congregated on the platform eating
their gelati, engaged in animated conversation until the danger had passed.
In his
book, Parks often alludes to the lost romance of rail travel. For example, he
talks about how Milano Centrale’s concourse has been turned from a rail terminus
into a shopping mall, where ubiquitous advertising and uniform shop frontage
detract from the marble and granite grandeur of the building. Many grand stations,
not just in Italy,
have sadly suffered the same fate.
Neither
should buying a ticket and jumping off on and off trains be taken for granted by
happy-go-lucky train travellers anymore, with many operators in Europe only offering
cheap-rate tickets if you book well in advance. Nowadays you might have to
venture further afield to enjoy the pleasures of low-cost train-hopping.
Fortunately,
Italy
is still one of those places. On its regional lines it may run rolling stock
which is far past its sell-by date and nowadays there is large-scale investment in semi-private high-speed initiatives which charge premium prices for reserved only
seats, such as the Italo and the Freccia Rossa, but admirably, the Ferrovie del
Stato still operates affordable services and rates on its normal regional lines
between the main centres. Buy a ticket today and it will still be valid two
months later for the same price.
