Is there anything more glamorous than an overnight train? Even when you’re climbing aboard wearing your husband’s raincoat, carrying an oat-encrusted car seat, with a six-month-old in a sling and an apple core fermenting gently and secretly in the side pocket of your rucksack?
Not that I know of. I love travelling by train – even now, when it’s as comprehensively bad as British rail privatisation has made it for, well, just about everyone save a few shareholders and the CEO of Pumpkin Cafe. But travelling at night? With the whisper of romance in the buffet car, the flash of sunset from the vestibule and a white-sheeted bunk bed to call your own? I love it even more.
Fourteen minutes before being invited on to the night train from London to Penzance, you would have found me in the customer lounge, eating shortbread and drinking apple juice like a woman who has just been told she must consume 7,000 calories in 15 minutes or the whole of Paddington station is going to blow. Luckily, I wasn’t averting an extremely specific act of terrorism; I was just getting my money’s worth because, let me tell you, night trains aren’t cheap. My husband and son managed to get to Italy and back by rail for less than it cost me to cross the Tamar on Great Western Rail.
But then again, can you really put a price on the extremely low-key glamour of washing your feet in the basin of a cabin that’s approximately the dimensions of an understairs coat rack but with more lighting options than my entire house? To lose none of your holiday but be offered a shower at five in the morning at Truro station? To wake up in the middle of the night and take a pee outside Plymouth at 80mph? To get porridge delivered to your door by a woman in a bottle-green polyester uniform before looking out of the window and muttering “Erth?” This is heaven. Or as Philip Larkin wrote, probably while on the 21.19 British Rail service to Hull: “Here is unfettered existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.”
