A Love Letter to Sleeper Trains
I love my bed and spend most of the day fantasising about collapsing into it, but sometimes when I wake I’m disappointed to find myself still in it and not on a sleeper train rumbling across an unfamiliar land.
Travel that transports you without a clear window on the journey is magical, as anyone who's ever climbed through 39,000 ft of solid cloud only to descend, a few hours later, somewhere where the air is warm and bright and smells of orange blossom, knows.
But air travel, for all its miraculousness, is grim - the queues, the crowds, the overstuffed luggage and 50ml limits, the pre-dawn flights and cramped cabins, and, overriding the unpleasantness of it all, the pollution. Sleeper trains, in contrast, are silver bullets speeding swiftly through the night - calmer, quieter, more elegant. They can't magic you from Los Angeles to London by morning, but they still perform the sorcerer's trick of transforming the world outside the window while you sleep. Even in tiny Britain, you can board in the sweaty grime of an August London night and wake up to the seagull-punctured silence of Scotland, sunshine sparkling on the morning sea. While swollen-ankled passengers stumble scratchy eyed from long haul flights, the sleeper traveller is at worst dishevelled, perhaps a little tired, but maybe well-rested after a night rocked gently through their dreams.
Night trains aren't really about sleep, though, but the adventure inherent in waking up somewhere else, somewhere new. After two static years of yearning for travel, I often dream about the night trains of my past. The one that collected me from the cool mountains of Plovdiv and deposited me, a gentle sleep later, in the heat of Varna on the black sea; the one I took from Cologne that split in the night, some carriages heading to Moscow and others to Prague, a living choose your own adventure.
Mostly though, I think about the trains I took in India when I was young. For the cost of a London tube fare, we crisscrossed the country on trains that ploughed through a day, a night, sometimes a second day as the landscape mutated from mountains to deserts, backwaters to cities.
I think about the morning I was woken by the chai walla's chant - 'chai, Nescoffee, chai, Nescoffee', and bought a coffee and sat, wrapped against the cold dawn in my bedsheet, at the open door at the end of the carriage.
No matter how many elegantly poured artisan coffees I drink in my life, I doubt I'll ever enjoy one as much as I did the three rupee paper cup of oversweet ‘Nescoffee’ I drank as the sun came up over hills I'd never seen before and we chugged towards it and the infinite possibilities of the unknown.