Book Review: Monisha Rajesh, Moonlight Express, Bloomsbury

The railways have survived into the 21st century by constantly reinventing themselves.

The railways have survived into the 21^st century by constantly reinventing themselves. Written off all too frequently by parsimonious politicians as a 19^th-century invention made redundant by the car and the aeroplane, the railways have since enjoyed a remarkable renaissance. Most happily, the sleeper train has made a comeback, despite the fact that towards the end of the last century the mostly state-owned rail companies decided it was too much hassle to provide couchettes and compartments on trains running through the night: they got in the way of essential track maintenance, their use tended to be seasonal, and much of the rolling stock was well past its sell-by date. Budget airlines and high-speed rail further contributed to their demise.

However, as Monisha Rajesh has found to her delight, not only have many long-established routes survived but new players, taking advantage of rules encouraging competition, have emerged to fill a need. It is that need that is at the heart of this book. It is not just about train travel, but rather about the way we get around. In Sweden, a private operator runs a service called ‘Snälltåget’ (the ‘kind train’), while a Belgian-Dutch co-operative has created the ‘Good Night Train’. Even some of the national rail companies have got in on the act, notably the Austrian railway ÖBB, which has created a whole new set of services across central and northern Europe in response to the renewed interest in this traditional form of travel. Covid, which initially killed train travel, has proved to be a boost, encouraging staycations and the notion of ‘slow travel’ where the journey is part of the holiday.

Rajesh, a Yorkshire lass who was seemingly a train enthusiast from birth and already has three railway-trip books to her name, uses her journeys both to relate her immediate experiences through encounters with fellow travellers and to provide the context of the lines on which she travels. It is by no means all backpackers, train spotters and oldies taking advantage of the same interrail tickets they enjoyed in their youth. She is excellent at drawing out the stories of why people are travelling by train and very few do not have a story to tell. There are, for the most part, cheaper alternatives and therefore most of the passengers have a specific reason to go by train, such as the woman taking her son to university the slow way in order to spend quality time with him, or the man teaching his five year old how to interact with strangers. On some trains there are even regular commuters who use it every week to travel between home and work.

Some of these trains, like the Doĝu Express, which runs from Ankara to Kars near the Armenian border, and the Norwegian trains heading north in the summer are so popular that seats fill up as soon as they go on sale.

Rajesh does not shy from the darker side of the rail industry. Part of the Norwegian railways were built by slave labour during the second world war on the orders of the German occupiers who were keen to extract vital minerals from the far north of the country. She recounts that the Norwegian rail operator was not an innocent bystander in this process but rather facilitated the Germans in their endeavour

Rajesh also highlights a night train journey like no other when she drops in on a Holocaust survivor whose life was saved when the train he was on was hijacked by the Belgian resistance and, at just 11 years old, he escaped into the bush while his mother remained on board to be gassed at Auschwitz. Rajesh explains that the Germans deliberately ran these death convoys at night in order to hide them from the Belgian public.

This is not quite a world tour as there are necessarily omissions such as Japan and Russia, but Rajesh obviously had to include India on her travels and also braves the Peruvian Andes and Amtrak ‘bringing me into the fold of Middle America’. Despite the occasional trips down branch lines where she perhaps should not have ventured as they provide a tad more detail than necessary, especially about the vagaries of her digestion system, her encounters with local travellers offer an insight into the lives of people we would never meet on a flight. Indeed, as she says, trains, and especially those operating on long overnight trips, are made for communication and interchange in contrast to planes where people are largely confined to their seats.

On her favourite routes, there are dining cars, or at least a bar serving local beer, and only the most introverted or shy will not start to chat to the people with whom they have by chance shared the experience of overnight travel. She teases out many intriguing stories though like her we never find out whether the heavily pregnant woman went on to have a successful delivery or whether that quiet young man finished his university course. The book is rather like the journeys themselves: a bit random and mazy, with occasional longueurs but full of the stuff of life.

Moonlight Express Around the World By Night Train by Monisha Rajesh

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/moonlight-express-9781526644121/

Christian Wolmar’s latest book is The Liberation Line, the last untold story of the Normandy Landings (Atlantic Books).

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