Overnight from Strasbourg to Marseille

Even if I hadn’t already bagged a promotional €15 (£10) one way fare, the weather forecast would have made up my mind. In Strasbourg in north-eastern France on Monday, five straight days of rain were predicted. Meanwhile in Marseille, 850km away to the south, five clear days of sunshine and 15ºC February days were expected.

My bargain ticket to the sun was provided by the online travel agency of the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français – French Railways). Voyages-SNCF.fr will seek to distract you with all kinds of special deals on hotels, air travel and car hire, but the site’s real pull is the booking engine of the French railway system. In addition to the basic travel booking service, the site is the portal to SNCF’s last minute online promotions, where visitors can browse deals on rail travel throughout the country.

At Strasbourg’s grand old station (currently being rebuilt for the imminent arrival of the fast TGV Est Européen), a crowd of sun seekers was waiting to board train 4297, the 20h56 Corail Lunéa service to Lyon, Avignon, Marseille, Toulon, St. Raphaël, Antibes and Nice. The SNCF may be a massive state owned operation, but its also a master of meaningless branding. Corail Lunéa means nothing much in French, but is the slinky marketing name for the network’s older overnight trains. Corail is the generic name for locomotive hauled passenger trains that operate on non-TGV lines. Corail Téoz run by day and Corail Lunéa (evoking the French word lune for moon) run by night. The SNCF recognised long ago that running heavily-staffed overnight trains with a variety of sleeper accommodations and a lounge car or restaurant simply didn’t make money. So by giving overnight services a snappy new name and emphasising the convenience of late night departures from one end of the country to the other, the SNCF was able to ditch the restaurant car and slim down the actual level of service. It upsets traditionalists, but with some savvy online promotions, it seems to be saving the romantic sleeper train and introducing new passengers to the services.

Our train has about six sleeper coaches and a couple of ‘open’ coaches with reclining seats. There are just two classes of sleeper accommodations: first class compartments with four bunks and second class couchettes with six bunks. Both compartments are the same size, so with three bunks on either side of a second class compartment, only a child would be able to sit up in bed.

SNCF cost cutting (sorry, cost efficiencies) have removed traditional bedding from the sleeper cars. Instead of sheets and a blanket (that take more time therefore cost more to be made up and cleaned) passengers find a lightweight sleeping bag on their bed. Two sides are buttoned together: one is padded and the other is a single sheet, so depending on how warm you are, you can choose whether to sleep under the thin sheet or the thicker blanket. Passengers do not undress to sleep, although the sleeping bags offer enough privacy to remove heavier trousers or clothes if you’re uncomfortable in them. These older carriages are ingeniously designed to work as both day coaches and sleeper coaches, even if the days when trans-continental journeys that require both are less and less common. In each compartment the three bunks can be folded away to form two facing bench seats. The lack of any bedding beneath my sleeping bag reveals the padded vinyl that these seats are upholstered with. Outside, that gloriously seventies’ colour-scheme of orange and brown hints at the train’s age.

We depart on time, and begin the journey south, stopping en route in the towns of Séléstat, Colmar, Mulhouse and Besançon. The SNCF emphasises a number of convenient timetabling gimmicks that make Lunéa services appealing. Leaving after 21h00 and arriving early in the morning Lunéa trains can justify the absence of a restaurant car by pointing out that most passengers would rather eat at home or in a restaurant before departure and after arrival. Some SNCF advertising even emphasises how Lunéa passengers can have friends round for a few drinks before the leave on vacation. Intermediate station stops are also kept to a minimum between midnight and 05h00 to help passengers get a good night’s sleep; besides – these shorter distance city pairs remain more popular with equivalent day services than night trains. Since passengers rarely travel in convenient groups of six, they’re grouped into compartments according to destination, so that you’re only woken by the conductor when you are getting near to your stop. Women travelling alone or with children can also specify a female-only compartment.

And the result? The evolution of the overnight train from a romantic and luxurious sleeper to a dormitory-style train might depress some, but its still a remarkably comfortable way to cover ground in France and save on a night’s accommodation. The ride was smooth, my compartment was shared between just three people and I slept well for most of the night. In fact the gentle rocking motion and lulling background sound of the train racing south was so conducive to sleep that I only woke up when we stopped at stations en route. At about 05h40, the conductor came through the train with the passenger manifest and gave us a curt but effective wake-up call.

Just before 06h00, we pull into Marseille’s Gare Saint Charles. With about six hours sleep under my belt, as well as a complimentary bottle of water and a courtesy pack with refreshment wipes, mints and ear plugs from my couchette, I step out into the pre-dawn night of Marseille refreshed, and ready for two days in the sun. Not only has €15 carried me from the north-east of France to the shore of the Mediterranean, it’s done so while I slept, giving me two full days in Marseille.

Corail Lunéa services operate between Paris and Toulouse, Irun/Hendaye, Port Bou/Cerbère, Latour de Carol, Bourg Saint Maurice, Saint Gervais, Nice/Vintimille, Briançon and Luchon. Away from Paris, services also operate betwween Luxembourg, Metz and Marseille/Nice; Reims and Marseille/Nice; Metz and Port Bou/Cerbère; Strasbourg and Port Bou/Cerbère; Lille and Marseille/Nice; Bourdeaux and Marseille/Nice; Hendaye/Irun and Geneva; Hendaye/Irun and Marseille/Nice.

Finding a pint down the sides of the sofa

A chilly winter’s night in Sheffield, the fourth largest city in England and the hidden metropolis of the county of South Yorkshire. Tucked between seven hills, just out of sight of the M1 motorway and between the two principal north-south main line railways of Great Britain, it’s no wonder that the city is often overlooked by native Brits.

Sheffield was a city built on the steel industry, an industry which collapsed and re-developed, and which now churns out more steel than at any point in the history of the city. But preconceptions about the city stuck, and Sheffield has now evolved into a quietly proud modern city, with two university’s and a healthy economy of service based industries. The mass employers are no longer the steel mills, but the technology and customer service companies that have sprung up around the edges of the compact city centre. The well educated graduate workforce seems to prefer to stay in the city after finishing their higher level studies, and with house prices on the up, Sheffield is managing to temper the senseless loft apartment boom of Leeds or Manchester with a lively music scene and cultural landscape that has no difficulty in being proudly different.

The centre of Sheffield can easily be criticised for the lack of interesting historical neighbourhoods. But looking closer it can more rewarding to unpick and unpeel the overlapping layers of successive masterplans: redevelopments that were planned to revitalise the city for a generation that was yet to be born. Around the fabulously cheap shopping precint of the Moor, such stained and rusting fifties architectural treats at this Grosevnor House Hotel hark bark to a rapidly disappearing era of tectonic concrete blocks and inhospitable underpasses: a miniature and more loveable recreation of Birmingham’s dreadful (and now demolished) sixties Bullring. Just a few hundred metres away, the next ‘new’ Sheffield is being finished and pushed into the public domain. The established city centre Peace Gardens have now been extended with new commercial developments on the site of the old City Council buildings. Perched incromprehensibly and insensitively between the Peace Gardens and the attractive glazed glu-lam hall of the indoor Winter Gardens is Sheffield’s latest white elephant: the Macdonald St. Paul’s Hotel. This four star hotel seems to have been built the wrong way round, with its reception area facing the Peace Gardens. A nice civic gesture, you might think, but a nightmare for those arriving by car or taxi: an automated bollard blocks the only road that accesses this entrance, and the appearance of the inelegant flat facade of the building does the city centre no favours at all.

So on just such a cold winter’s night, it’s reassuring to find that the ‘old’ Sheffield is still here, in the constantly changing, constantly ‘regenerated’ city centre. On Norfolk Street, a stone’s throw from the Macdonald St. Paul and less than ten minutes walk from the railway station is the Brown Bear. This two room pub has managed to hold out, not only from sweeping redevelopment of it’s higgledy-piggledy block, but also from comprehensive takeover by monopolistic chain pubs. The decor on both sides of the pub (divided by the single island bar) reminds you immediately of your location: dozens of old theatre and pantomime posters have been collaged to paper the walls, and that’s only appropriate considering the large number of theatre-goers who come for a pre- or post-theatre drink. But stay a little longer, and you’ll find a much more varied clientelle. The variety of accents will remind you of Sheffield’s different neighbourhoods and the occasional clump of students will have you checking your change the first time you order at the bar. Associated solely with the Tadcaster Brewery, the pub only sells drinks produced or marketed by that brewery. And while you might bemoan the absence of your favourite homogenous international lager, you should at least try Tadcaster’s finest. At the time of writing, a pint of Sovereign Bitter was just £1.31. I was able to get the first round in using the small change I’d been collecting in various trouser pockets at home. Until I hear otherwise, the Brown Bear retains my recommendation as both Sheffield’s cheapest and most honest city centre pub.

Breakfast? Follow the hi-vis jackets

The area around the two London railway terminals of King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations is a-buzz almost twenty-four hours a day with ongoing construction work for the imminent arrival of international Eurostar services. Britain’s first dedicated high speed rail line (optimistically numbered CTRL1, in case we ever get round to building another) will soon be open to passenger traffic, flying through Kent from the Channel Tunnel, skirting around the capital, past the east London site of the 2012 Olympics and into the newly refurbished and extended St. Pancras station on the northern side of the city centre. Journey times will be shorter and connections to other parts of Britain will be improved.

While all this construction work continues, a massive workforce of contractors, builders and labourers are on site building the new infrastructure. Finding myself at St. Pancras early one Sunday morning, the building site between St. Pancras and King’s Cross is already crowded with men about to start work. There isn’t really a uniform as such, but everyone is wearing a luminescent high-visibility yellow jacket and hard helmet. Originally designed to make sure workers could be seen on site by those operating heavy machinery, they’ve effectively become a cloak that symbolises inconspicuity in the city. Next time you’re in London, count the number of yellow jackets that you see in a short walk. They’re everywhere, and yet we’ve become so used to them they no longer catch our attention.

I have just arrived back in London after two weeks in Canada and America. Having already been delayed by two days, I’m eager to get on my train and go home. But being a penny pinching self-supporting traveller, I booked a cheap train ticket that is restricted to the service I specified when I reserved. Whereas I allowed for a safe cushion to get from Heathrow to St. Pancras, we actually arrived early and I’ve managed to ride the tube into London in less than an hour. With time to kill until my train leaves for Sheffield at 10h30, I need something to eat. With the redevelopment of King’s Cross and St. Pancras, the whole neighbourhood around the two stations is being gentrified. It was never a particularly savoury place to find yourself, and undoubtedly the powers of commercial development have seen that there could be good money to be made in tarting up the future arrival point for European tourists and business travellers. So standing outside King’s Cross on the corner of the Euston Road and York Way, I am already disgusted to find generic chain coffee bars popping up. After a fortnight away in the land of real diners, real fast food and real baristas, the last thing I want is a tepid over roasted Starbucks and an overpriced stale pastry. I’m British, damnit, and I want some grease in the morning…

It’s a beautiful winter’s Sunday morning, with a clear blue sky above me and a mild fresh bite to the air. It’s not yet seven thirty, and for a few moments I just stand on the corner, yearning for the ideal greasy spoon ‘caff’ to magically appear in place of the McDonald’s restaurant that has occupied a prime retail location near-by.

But then I realise that the answer is all around me. Where builders congregate, builders find greasy spoons. And I notice a small but promising stream of yellow hi-vis jackets heading east down the Pentonville Road.

I sneak off in hot (if silent) persuit. And within one hundred metres, I’ve struck gold. Adjacent to the King’s Cross Thameslink station on Pentonville Road (at number 275) is the Modern Snack Bar. A diminuitive facade opens to reveal a handful of tables with refilled bottles of tomato ketchup and laminated menus. A few very content contractors in hi-vis jackets bearing the slogan ‘CTRL’ are already tucking in. The Italian proprietor is talking animatedly with a friend, while a young waitress serves. I’m barely on the chair before I’ve decided what I’m having. For £4.75, I’ve found a proper English breakfast in the heart of King’s Cross. With a mug of hot, sweet milky tea and a groaning plate of bacon, sausage, beans, eggs and mushrooms, my first day back in Britain has been kick started.

So next time you have a hankering for some greasy English morning cuisine, you know which colour jackets you need to follow.

EU delayed flights and your legal rights

You might remember my earlier post in which I described how a aeroplane computer fault lead to a five hour delay flying from London Heathrow to Montréal Trudeau. Well, it’s worth remembering your rights in these circumstances. If you are:

• flying to the European Union (EU) on an European Union carrier
• flying from the EU on any carrier,

then you should be aware of your rights in cases of delay, cancellation, and denied boarding. This website of the European Union explains them: http://ec.europa.eu/transport/air_po…rmation_en.htm

Thanks to FlyerTalk member Zorn for the tip.

The longest night

Perhaps you know the pattern of internal emotions that you go through when waiting for a heavily delayed flight.

I was nice and early at London Heathrow terminal three yesterday morning, with more than three hours in hand for flight AC865, the daily 15h00 departure for Montréal. The previous week, hoardes of flightless masses grounded at Heathrow by dense fog had filled our television screens and newspaper cover stories. This time, however, the air was clear.

‘Landside’, Heathrow is almost always overwhelmed with queues as passengers wait to clear security. Once ‘airside’ of security, Heathrow is overwhelmed with duty free shopping. Terminal three is no different, with a large centralised holding lounge where passengers wait for their gates to be called. Every free meter of wall space has been punched through to create a retail or catering unit. Dozens of shops, including such high class units as Harrods and Chanel, all compete to distract you as you while away the now obligatory two hour wait. Windows do not provide rentable space, so the British Airport Authority does not encourage their use.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Sunlight became a distant memory, even more so as it became obvious that my flight was going to be delayed.

AC865 was some way down the list of departures when I arrived, and some way off from being assigned a gate. As preceding flights opened, boarded, closed and departed, AC865 gradually shunted up the departure screens. But then as the last sixty minutes began to tick away, it remained firmly unopen, and subsequent flights began to open, board, close and depart. AC865 remained stubbornly at the top of the screens, glued to the monitor with the same moronic largely useless:

Please Wait.

Two hours after the scheduled departure time, there was still no news of what was up, and only snippets of information were being circulated amongst passengers who had begun to recognise each other as the unlucky few who had still not left for Montréal. Eventually the waiting lounge grapevine reported that we had passed the magical three hour delay, and therefore food and drinks were being laid on for us (up to a value of £10, mind) at two concessions in the lounge. The sun had already set, and unusually for a westbound trans-Atlantic flight, this was going to be a flight in complete darkness.

At eight o’clock (five hours late) a gate is announced and a weary crowd of recognisable faces tramps to the gate. Once processed and shuttled to a remote stand (number 593) we find out what was holding us up. Two computers that controlled one of the engines of the Airbus A330 had developed irrecoverable faults, and had to be replaced. Had this happened at almost any other airport, spares would have had to have been flown in. As it was, ours were luckily found in the warehouse of another airline at Heathow.

Just after nine o’clock in the evening (fifteen hours after I woke up to begin to journey to Heathrow) we rolled onto Heathrow’s runway 27R and shot off towards Canada. On the in-flight ‘air show’, a small icon representing our plane began to edge across a map of the Atlantic, one pixel every few minutes. The map was elegantly coloured in the blues and greens of a childhood atlas, but outside everything was shrouded in night.

We flew for almost seven hours and lost five more as we crossed the time zones heading west. The first lights of New Brunswick and then Québec caught my eye through the window, before we began our descent over a wintry Montréal. The city’s orange phosphorous lights were particularly bright that night, as they reflected off the fresh snowfall (the first of the season, notably late this year) and into the sky.

There did not appear to be any other flights arriving when we did: the vast customs hall was empty of passengers when I strode through, and only one baggage belt was operating. I stepped out of arrivals and into a taxi just after 23h30 (04h30 London time). We flew along the autoroute into the city, and I considered this seemingly endless night.

I woke the next morning at 06h00, which I counted as a lie in considering that my body clock was still on English time. The sun rose a little after 07h30, closing a traveller’s night that had followed me for a full nineteen hours. It’s a wonder that travel doesn’t make me jaundiced.

Every cloud has its silver lining

From the letters page of the Independent newspaper, Saturday 23 December 2006:

Sir: As part of the 51 per cent of the population who did not take a flight this year, I cannot help but find a beautiful irony in fog grounding hundreds of planes at Heathrow (“A sorry story that highlights the flaw in aviation policy”, 22 December).

How nice to see the climate wrecking flights for a change, rather than, as usually happens, flights wrecking the climate.

R. GEORGE, LONDON SW19

Just before Christmas we were treated the sights of hundreds of emotional travellers left stranded at London Heathrow, as thick fog stubbornly refused to shift from the two rather unsophisticated stretches of concrete that sandwich the central complex of terminals at the airport.

Television newsreaders and newspaper copy writers were excitedly describing it as ‘travel chaos’, or even with as ‘travel misery’. Airlines were already being marked down as ‘beleagured’ before the inclement weather had settled in – it has not been a good year for commercial aviation in Europe. The much vaunted double deck Airbus A380 – which was supposed to relieve so much congestion at hub airports such as Heathrow – has slipped behind schedule, and governments across Europe are finally waking up to the rather late realisation that it’s time to start taxing people who fly for the environmental damage that their flights are causing (although Gordon Brown’s extra £5 a flight is not going to be nearly enough).

In order to loosen some slack at the airport, British Airways cut all domestic routes in and out of Heathrow for the duration of the heavy fog. What astonished so many bystanders was the sheer number of domestic flights that we have flying in and out of Heathrow every day. For an island nation whose length can barely justify overnight sleeper trains, it was incredible that this meant one hundred and fifty fewer flights would be operating than on a normal day.

While it is getting more and more socially acceptable to harang someone over the dinner table for flying with Easyjet from London Stantsed to Newcastle (almost as acceptable, in fact, as haranging a smoker, in fact) the fog at Heathrow revealed a problem. The vast proportion of BA’s affected passengers who were trying to fly on domestic routes were those who had just arrived or who were trying to depart on international long-haul services. The low cost airlines may have sewn up Europe from your local airport, but for long haul BA is still one of the most competitive and popular airlines from throughout Great Britain. Their business strategy of not fighting with the lo-co airlines has paid off: BA is now doing very well off strong long haul business, and their European and domestic network is primarily a feeder into this.

And here’s the rub. Door to door, from the centre of London to the centre of Newcastle, the train still edges it, as it does between London and Manchester, Glasgow, Paris and Brussels. But our skies are still going to be clogged with this insane volume of domestic routes for as long as our airports and rail networks exist independently of one another, each operated by independent (and increasingly private) organisations. If we’re serious about cutting aeroplane emissions, we need a whole new level of joined up thinking.

Next time you find yourself at Amsterdam Schipol airport (one of the world’s finest international hubs) have a look in the basement of the landside terminal. It’s one of the biggest railway stations you’ve even seen in an airport. And there are trains to every corner of the Netherlands twenty four hours a day. London’s airports at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and City all boast about their integrated railway stations, but until airports are plugged into a national network of intercity railway routes that operate in and out of the airports before the first and after the last flights, we’re going to be playing a second rate game. And a dense cloud of fog could foul up everyones’ Christmas all over again.

Connecting at Ely

“This must be the coldest place on earth,” says the businessman in the heavy and expensive looking duffel coat. He is stirring sugar into his cup of coffee at the small platform counter of the L.A. Wild Bean coffee shop at Ely railway station.

I attempt to engage in some polite and mildly witty conversation, suggesting that actually the coldest place on earth is about two metres to his right, where I’m sitting on a steel and wicker garden chair, optimistically provided by the café management for al fresco caffeine consumption in comfort. But the businessman does not hear me. The pretty young woman of non-descript Eastern European origin who is making his coffee hads evidently distracted him, although somewhat pleasingly, he isn’t having any luck starting a conversation with her either.

Ely, and its famous cathedral, is built on a small hill in the middle of the Cambridgeshire fens, once a vast area of marsh and coastal inlets that has been reclaimed over the course of a few centuries. Ely railway station sits on the edge of this low protrusion from the fins, and from the platform waiting passengers peer out into the vast landscape of intensively cultivated fields. Not only is it very cold today (barely above zero celius at midday), but there is thick fog blanketing the countryside for miles around us. It appears increasingly unlikely that the sun will burn it away before descending beneath the horizon again. On the island platform across the tracks from me, lonely passengers wait for trains to London King’s Cross and Stansted Airport against a pitch white backdrop of white. To my left, at one end of the station, a busy road passes underneath the northbound railway lines. A strip of tall, bare trees line on side of this road as it stretches away from us into the mist. Each tree is markedly less visible than the one before it: half an avenue vanishes into the fog.

The road passes under a low bridge, so any vehicle taller than a Transit van has to climb a sharp incline parallel to the road and cross the railway lines via a level crossing next to the bridge. Unfortunately for the long line of trucks, lorries and vans, Ely is a relatively important junction between north-south and east-west railway lines, and the gates of the crossing sometimes stay down for fifteen minutes or more, as successive freight and passenger trains pass by. In this jolly country of the privatised railway, every identical three car diesel sprinter that comes by has been dressed up in a different set of colours for a different commercial operator. One green and white train belongs to the singularly mis-named and uncapitalised ‘one railway’, as does another which has yet to be re-liveried from the colours of ‘Anglia Railways’. A green train belonging to ‘Central’ rumbles in, burbles for a few minutes, and then rumbles off again, back in the same direction that it came from. Then a sleek and mildly whining red, white and blue train glides in, carrying passengers on a fast service to London.

Two noisy freight trains pass in quick succession, and finally the level crossing gates go up. A flurry of heavy goods vehicles shoot across the line, knowing that they could be help up for another quarter of an hour if they’re not quick about it.

My toes are cold, and my train is still fifteen minutes away.

First published on jamesbrownontheroad.wordpress.com