I’m fighting to save night trains – the ticket to my daughter’s future
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Version 0 of 1. Back in May I was on a sleeper train between Paris and Berlin, chewing on a biro and filling out a questionnaire. As the sun set across the rolling hills of the French countryside, I assiduously answered question after question about how often I used night trains and how I felt about the standard of service. I was hopeful that the questionnaire heralded a new era of growth in this crucial service. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This month Germany’s state railway provider, Deutsche Bahn, confirmed it has decided to terminate a large number of overnight services, including the lines from Copenhagen to Basle/Amsterdam/Prague, and Paris to Hamburg/Berlin/Munich. The network cites low income, high overheads, losses of millions of euros and slow growth. I stopped flying in 2011. At the time, I was working with the scientist Stephen Emmott, developing a show, Ten Billion, about population growth, climate change and the environmental changes taking place as a result of human activity. The project made me realise that if I wanted to change the way the world worked, I had to change something about how I lived. Specifically, I had to change the way I travelled: I was in the middle of a period of intense work in theatres and opera houses across mainland Europe, taking more than 40 flights a year. As the environmental mobility check on Deutsche Bahn’s website will tell you, carbon dioxide emissions from a one-way London-Paris trip amount to 3.2kg by train, 74.6 kilograms by car and 72.1 kilograms by plane. London to Berlin is 7.7kg by train, 180kg by car and 126.5kg by plane. At first, I started travelling by day. Once a week I took the first train out of London on Monday at 6.50am – arriving in Cologne at 12.15pm – then the last train back on Friday night. It didn’t feel that much longer than flying, if you include the time it takes to get to the airport. The effort involved also had the added return of intellectual satisfaction – I had made the effort to do something about my carbon emissions. In 2012 I started work in Berlin, and the effort to reach my destination increased. The fastest route from London to Berlin means leaving at 6.25am and arriving in Berlin at 5pm – about 12 hours travelling and two connections. Later I travelled for work to Hamburg, Vienna and Salzburg (taking my journey times sometimes up to around 16 hours). These long trips were physically exhausting and my commitment to train travel began to waver. That’s when I discovered City Night Line overnight trains, which revolutionised my pan-European travel. I could take the CNL train from Berlin Hauptbahnof at 00.27 and arrive in London (via Cologne and Brussels) at 11.57. Furthermore, overnight trains reduced the number of changes I had to make, meaning I was no longer vulnerable to delayed or cancelled trains. Gradually, I fell in love with the strange new world of night train travel. Most of the time the trains move relatively slowly, and in the early hours of the morning there are often long periods where they just stand around in a station somewhere. Many of the night trains were built in the 80s, and the experience isn’t unlike riding an old steam train. Although I love the smooth speed of the spacious ICE trains or the double-layered TGV, there is nothing like the comforting chug of these night trains as they crawl across Europe. My fellow travellers were an eclectic mix. You met elderly couples who didn’t like flying, women a few weeks away from giving birth, large Asian families, student backpackers, environmentalists and artists. People came from all over Europe and there were always five or six different languages being spoken over a single journey. When I found out that the key sleeper routes across the continent were being axed, it was a huge blow. To many people these trains are the only workable alternative to short-haul flying. The decision to cancel them seems even more scandalous in the light of the current European Union directive on carbon reductions. How can you claim you are encouraging a major shift from flying to train travel while simultaneously cutting one of the main arteries of travel across Europe? The market imperatives of growth and profit evidently stand in the way of pan-European co-operation on improved rail services. You do wonder what the European Union is there for if it can’t even keep these trains running. I was travelling with my eight-year-old daughter when I found out about the end of the CNL lines, which made the situation even more delicate for me. She was one of the reasons I had resolved to reduce my carbon footprint in the first place. I wanted to do something to help her future, so I had made an effort to show her night train travel early and it had become a favourite treat. We went to chat to the sleeping car attendant, a very withdrawn man in his late 40s. All three of us sat pensively in an empty compartment. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “It’s just about money. This line from Paris to Berlin has been open since before the first world war. This is a piece of history.” He seemed tired of it all. “I’ll keep my job,” he said. We’ve since tracked down a website and signed a petition, and have embarked on finding the email address of Europe’s transport commissioner to write a personal letter of protest. Immediately after talking to the attendant, my daughter and I walked to the end of the carriage and looked out of the glass window in the train door at the receding railway tracks. We stood there hand in hand, watching the mesmeric way that the tracks sped away, and I was overwhelmed by the pointlessness of all my efforts in the face of the looming environmental threat – and terrified by the future that my child could be heading into. |