On the evening of our overnight train journey from Amsterdam to Berlin and on to Dresden aboard the European Sleeper, we enjoy a restorative plate of oysters and steak tartare on the decks of Amsterdam’s BrasserieMarie overlooking the Amstel. Then, after a nightcap in the adjoining Freddy’s Bar, a legendary spot in the Hotel De L’Europe, we make the short stroll to Amsterdam Centraal Station for the so-called Good Night Train.
At 22.20 we board the train to Berlin, the bunks are swiftly made up and the blinds part pulled down for sleep. You can open the window for fresh air, brush your teeth in your own basin and there is crisp, clean linen. This slow journey is all about the romance of life on the track – and, for me, a lingering nostalgia.
To avoid my car-sickness as a child, I’d be taken on night trains across the Alps, those peaks of whipped meringue that collapsed on to the plate of the Po Valley by morning. Today, on the Brussels to Prague route, it’s to bed and in that soothing suspension of time and place, that familiar funnel of darkness, I surrender to the clicking rhythm of the track and fall soundly asleep.
Day two, 06.00. Early morning arrives with a wake-up call: a hot drink in a polystyrene cup and breakfast in a box. The city approach is through a patchwork of urban gardens known as Schrebergärten. The fenced green colonies with their inhabited shacks on former no man’s land along railways is a typical German phenomenon, the ticket inspector tells me. It harks back to the first world war when the extra food production provided by allotments was part of Berlin’s war effort.
This strange rooftop gnomesville soon gives way to the futuristic glass prism structure that is Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the largest railway terminal in Europe, welcoming 1,200 trains a day. It is impossible to remain unmoved by the vast space, across five floors, teeming with life and possibility, connecting to the continent and, imaginatively, to the rest of the world; to Belarus, Finland, Russia and Kazakhstan, before the reality of the Ukraine war put a stop to that.
Berlin serves as a hub for the night trains which, alongside…
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