The View From The Train

I've added pictures to some of the posts in my blog, which I hope will give you a small glimpse of the places I have seen, and some of the trains that carried me there. I took them with a Ricoh GR1V using B&W film and a yellow-orange filter, then scanned the finished prints; in retrospect, a digital camera would have been a wise investment.......
I hope you've enjoyed reading about my adventures, and would welcome any comments or questions you may have; my travels are not over yet, and in a few weeks I hope to be spicing up my blog with more tales of railway journeys in far away places.

Zuge Endet Hier

In the morning I repack my rucksack for the flight back to England; I rationalise the contents and discard some of the unused things I have carried around central Europe for the last eleven weeks, wondering why I didn’t do so sooner. I leave my battered copy of Fatherland on the table next to some unwanted shower gel and an airline-prohibited aerosol can, and place a stack of small Forint coins in front of these for the maid. As I eat a breakfast of omelette and coffee, the owner of the Panzio strikes up a stilted conversation about the town and my travel plans; he speaks a few words of English and is fluent in Hungarian; but my limping and limited German is his preference. He tells me he is from Hamburg, and I suddenly realise my mistake in leaving a particular book in my room; but there is nothing I can do about this: I have settled my bill and deposited the keys. My only hope is that the maid does not discover her treasures before I have finished breakfast and reached the safety of the station.
My last train is the 11.32 to Budapest Keleti Palyuadvar. It is a typical Saturday in Hungary: the shops are winding down for the weekend and the bustle of last minute shoppers is only countered by the relaxed atmosphere of the cafes and bars, the unhurried stroll back from the river front market. I walk across the Platz for the last time, cross the square, and pause at the booth outside the station to buy water for the journey; the steps into the station are already host to shoppers returning to the countryside, their bulging plastic bags gathered around them as they sit patiently on the freezing stone for what might be a wait of several hours. The train is standing at platform 3 behind a V43 electric in the InterCity colours of blue and grey, distinguishing it from the utilitarian flat blue of the locally based engines. One of the four second class coaches is an old 1st class that has been downgraded but not changed, and I find a comfortable single window seat with armrests and enough room to stretch my legs out; the train heating, although welcome after the insidious cold of the platform, is set at full and within a few minutes I am peeling off layers of outer clothing, trying to acclimatise to my new environment. There are few other passengers, and only a handful of people join the train at each stop; one or two backpackers and a small family share my coach, sometimes a local gets on for a couple of stops, but few people seem to want to travel to Budapest on a Saturday morning. I arrive at Keleti and drink an espresso at a booth beneath the statues guarding entrance. There is a bustling energy to the Palyaudvar that never seems to dissipate, regardless of the day or the hour; the improbably distant destinations, the excitement, anticipation, and despair, the beginnings and endings – the possibilities – reverberate around the spectacular train shed. The epitome of a railway terminus: history, architecture, romance, and the promise of adventure. The striking new Berlin Hauptbahnhof, New York’s Grand Central station, or Paris’ Gare Du Nord are inspiring places to begin or end a journey, and each have some of these ingredients - but never all together; this is why Budapest Keleti Palyuadvar is my favourite station and a kind of spiritual home for all that I love about railways.
I walk down to the Metro and find that M2 to Deak Ter – where I need to connect to M3 - is closed for rebuilding. I take tram 24 to Nagyvarad Ter instead, and take M3 to the end of the line at Kobanya-Kispest and the sprawling train-bus-tram interchange. A long, wide, enclosed footbridge spans the tracks and bus station, lined with booths and shops, groups of seedy looking men drinking Borok and vodka in the dark corners and recesses. The wind drives waves of sleet across the dirty windows that overlook the car park below and rattles the corrugated steel walls. I find a bar halfway across the bridge and drink a Borsodi while I wait for the airport bus; the windows are blanked out, and a heavy curtain hangs over the door as if to shield passers-by from witnessing some sordid encounter. A portable gas heater battles against the draughts that seem to come from everywhere at once, and I can feel the cold seeping through the bridge’s floor: a less amenable venue for a farewell drink I cannot imagine. The bus drops me across the main road from the airport, the sleet turned to snow, the wind howling down the dual carriageway as I weave through the traffic to terminal one. I check in and go through to departures without any delays or searches, my passport barely even looked at. When my flight is called I walk downstairs to the WC and smoke a cigarette; there is a group of probably 10 people hovering around the door smoking; most of them are airport staff and security guards, and the air is thick enough to make my eyes water. I reach the gate as the last of the passengers walk out to the 737 and find a window seat over the wings. There’s a twenty minute delay as the ground crew de-ice the aircraft, then a quick push-back and taxi, the engines throttling to full power just before the jets nose swings out of the taxiway and lines up with the runway. Half an hour later the captain announces we are cruising at 11 kilometres above the Czech border with an outside air temperature of -63oC, something it’s impossible to relate with the warm aircraft cabin or cruising round the Balaton shore behind an old M41 diesel on a hot and sunny afternoon.
My sister is waiting at Luton to meet me. The airport is functional, stark and unwelcoming. It has a temporary, pre-fabricated feel, as if the thin partition internal walls might be moved at any moment; disembarking passengers are funnelled through walkways that shake beneath their feet and herded into cordoned pens for passport control before being spat out into the arrivals hall as quickly as possible. We drive through the grimy Luton suburbs and out into the unseen English landscape; the darkened fields and silhouetted trees are indefinably different from those of central Europe; the country feels distinctly different even though it is so familiar and clearly unchanged. Or perhaps it is me that is no longer the same, an outside observer of a strange country: could I really have changed so much in 77 days?
We arrive in the Cotswolds late in the evening; I go to bed in the peace of rural England, my map folded and stowed, no train times jotted in the back page of my notebook for the morning. An owl calls from the trees outside my window, and I imagine I hear the distant blast of an M41 or M62s air horns somewhere far away in the night - but its just the wind. The journey is over.

Last Train To Budapest

I have a breakfast of black coffee in the Panzio then take the Metro to Nguyati to change some money. As I walk down Oktober 6 Utca to the K&H bank, I find a second-hand bookshop with English titles tucked away in a courtyard, almost invisible from the street. They have a small selection of paperbacks and I buy a tattered copy of Fatherland for a few hundred Forints. From the bank I cross back to the station for an espresso and study the timetable, looking for a destination where I can eek out the last of my funds for the next week. There are trains to Balaton, Pecs, and Esztergom, but little more than commuter services make up the rest of the departures. There are no M41 diesels here and certainly no Russian M62s; the M61 has made its last run of the year and is back in the museum, and only rows of V43 electrics occupy the platforms. I take the Metro to Keleti and resume my study there. There are departures to Minsk, Moscow, Berlin, Beograd, and Vienna; Zagreb, Kiev, Warsaw, and Hamburg. They are pulled by an assortment of V43s, V63s, Taurus electrics, and even a solitary M41 – I would catch them all if I could. I note down the times for Gyor instead; Budapest is too expensive to stay for very long, although I am grateful for its facilities after so long in the provinces. I take the tram back to Nagyvarad Ter and shop in the Prosi Elemmizer for food. I eat in my room, shower, change, and walk to the Metro station; for my last night in Budapest I take M3 to Deak Ter and sit in a dimly lit little bar off Deak Utca. There are no tourists here – they are drawn to the bright lights and high prices of the bars and restaurants that line the Danube – and I feel perfectly comfortable and at ease with the local crowd, much more so than I would on the banks of the river. A television on the wall is showing a national football match and there’s a great deal of good natured rivalry between the customers; nobody pays the slightest attention to the Englishman sitting in the corner in his Hungarian jacket reading a book about Germany. It is almost midnight when I catch the Metro back to my room; the underground station is quiet and eerie, echoing footsteps and the distant rumble of an approaching train enough to raise the hairs at the back of the neck. The train is empty and dimly lit; the entrance to Nagyvarad Ter, by contrast, is brightly illuminated and full of people lying on cardboard mattresses and old cushions. I tiptoe between the sleeping bundles, trying not to disturb what little comfort they have managed to find, thankful I will be sleeping between clean sheets in a warm room and not wrapped in a filthy blanket in a freezing station.
I take the 11.10 to Gyor in the morning and arrive two hours later in a rainstorm. I walk to the TourInform booth in the Platz and book a room in a charming little Panzio down a cobbled alley in the old town. I am soaked to the skin by the time I reach my room, and as soon as I close the door the rain stops. I walk through the old baroque town to the riverfront where the market is held a couple of times a week. The traders are local people with produce from their smallholdings and gardens, the paprika and onions and leafy headed bunches of carrots displayed on upturned cardboard boxes; business is brisk, and the half dozen stalls cooking sausages for the shoppers to eat with hunks of bread are doing a roaring trade. As the afternoon draws in and the traders start packing up for the day there is a flurry of snow: the thermometer in the square says 2 degrees and falling, and a bitter wind has sprung up. I eat a meal of catfish soup at a tiny bar facing the River Raba under a low vaulted brick ceiling, adding a spoonful of chilli sauce as the locals do; the result is delicious and spicy, more of a stew than a soup to eat with the basket of bread that accompanies it. The temperature is zero when I walk back to my room, the snow falling in big soft flakes to settle on the cobblestones and terracotta roofs.
In the morning sky is blue and the snow crystallised against the small crooked window of my attic room. A table has been set for breakfast – not something that is usually included in the price of a room – and they cook me an enormous plate of scrambled eggs with ham and paprika, topping up my coffee cup constantly. The thermometer in the square flickers between zero and minus one as I walk to the station, and as I approach, I hear a familiar but unexpected diesel exhaust note: an M61 is sitting in platform one with a three coach train decorated for the 50th anniversary of the uprising. One of the carriages has been converted into a mobile museum which is touring the country, stopping for a morning or an afternoon at every town and city in Hungary; there is a seating coach and a separate sleeping car for the support crew behind this, and the gleaming M61 at the front. I am surprised to find that it’s not the same engine I rode to Esztergom – I was convinced that was the only survivor – but a beautifully restored model owned and maintained by MAV Technik, Hungarian Railways’ engineering department. This makes me feel slightly less guilty about breaking the door handle off the M61 at the museum. Some modern touches have been added to the engine – an in-cab computer, aluminium identification plates bearing its European wide recognition number, a revised colour scheme – but the wooden window frames, body side portholes, and cast Nohab builder’s plate are all original. A small panel near the cab reads MY Class - 50 Anniversary Tour: Budapest–Odense-Budapest: in 2004 all the surviving locomotives made by this builder were brought together in the Danish city for display, and this one travelled there and back under its own power from Hungary - a feat in itself for a forty year old locomotive – at a cost of 17,000 Euros to the organisers. The engine shuts down and I walk through the museum coach; I am unable to read any of the panels of text, but the photographs of a devastated Budapest and the chattering of small arms fire behind the audio commentary is quite enough to bring the story to life as I follow the uprising from 23rd October to the crushing deployment of 1000 Soviet tanks.
Back on the platform, the M61 is attracting more attention than the museum exhibits: both cabs are crammed with people being given a guided tour of the engine compartment; people climb down onto the track to take photographs or pose in front of the engines distinctive swooping nose, the national flag in a roundel at its centre where once there was a Soviet star. Several people set up video cameras at the trackside to film the M61 as it starts up and takes the travelling museum eastwards out of the station, the vintage locomotive looking and sounding as fresh as if it had just this day rolled out of the Nohab factory in Trondheim.
It is snowing again as I leave the station and walk to the internet café. I email my sister in England and confirm the arrangements for flying back the following evening, then change the last of my Euros into Forints. I divide the notes into separate piles for train and Metro fares to Budapest airport; a large pile for the Panzio room; a smaller pile for food and drinks for the journey. I wash and change and take what’s left to the riverfront bar and sit in a corner with a Borsodi and my notebook. Inside it is as warm and cosy as the sort of snug you would find in an old English pub; outside the night is numb with cold, a low, freezing mist hanging over the river. Tomorrow I will take my last train to Budapest and will sleep in a small Cotswold village. It doesn’t seem possible.

Two Beginnings,Two Ends

It is unusually quiet outside the window of my room in the morning; there is little traffic and few people to be seen. I drink an espresso in the etterem - there is thankfully no sign of The Hag - and walk into town to change some money. The K&H bank is closed, as is almost everything else, and I remember that today is 23rd October: 50 years ago the students rose up to challenge Communist rule, and a public holiday marks the start of a struggle that finally triumphed more than 30 years later. Piac Utca is festooned with Hungarian flags. They hang from every lampost and in every shop window, above every government building and the closed doors of the bank. A group of perhaps 300 people have gathered for a memorial ceremony in the square facing the church; there is vigorous applause for the speakers and a lot of flag waving, the achievement of independance recent enough to be in many of the crowds memories. I pass an apartment block with a cast concrete depiction of Soviet shock workers toiling under a Red Star fixed to the wall, the Hungarian national flag draped over one corner; there is barely any evidence of socialist times in Debrecen, and I am surprised this has survived in plain view when the statues have been removed from the parks and the hammer and sickle prised from the public buildings.
I take the tram to the park and walk the forest paths, past the empty boating lake and boarded up Hot Dogey stands, the zoo and the chained up fairground rides until I find a wood cabin at the edge of a pond where I buy a Borsodi to drink at one of the tables in the late afternoon sun. I watch families and couples stroll by, the younger ones chatting and laughing, the older ones respectfully quiet, perhaps remembering other holidays and walks in the park when times were not quite so free. I walk back to town in the gathering dusk; the square is empty now, the handful of etterems and bars that have opened attracting little custom. I buy some food at the Non-Stop ABC and go back to my room. Setting the alarm for the morning train to Szolnok and Szeged I have an early night, but I’m not tired and lie in the darkness listening to the forlorn sound of the few cars that pass below my window. There are no footfalls or voices from the pavement outside, just the faint echo of the announcer drifting across from the station – a lonely sound in the stillness of an empty night.
There are half a dozen people waiting on the freezing platform for the 5am train to Szeged; two men are sharing a bottle of vodka to ward off the chill, while a third sleeps across a bench, a blanket drawn tightly around him. Nothing moves in the station. The nights’ shunting is done, the sidings are silent, and there are no platform announcements. A V63 looms out of the misty darkness and clatters through the station with a train piled high with turnips. I watch as one tumbles down a heap and falls off the wagon, bouncing along the platform like something from The Dambusters, skimming the shoes of one of the drinkers and hitting the locked platform booth's door with an almighty crash. The man on the bench snores his way through this minor drama. My train arrives shortly before five, pushed into the platform by a diesel shunter while a V43 electric waits to back onto the lead carriage. It is cold and damp inside, the carriages having spent the last three days in the sidings with the doors and some of the windows open; it is fifteen minutes before my compartment seems less cold than the brown fields and grey dawn outside the window.
There is a ten minute stop at Szolnok and I stand on the platform with a cigarette and watch an M41 diesel back onto a commuter train for an unpronounceable town lost on the Great Plain. The driver revs the engine to full power to push the buffers hard together, sending a huge cloud of grey-brown exhaust rolling down the platform funnelled beneath the canopy, while the shunter climbs down between the locomotive and train to couple them up. When he emerges he is holding a posey of weeds he has picked from the track and offers them to the driver at his open cab window, eyelids fluttering, legs chastely crossed at the knees. There’s a ripple of laughter from the waiting passengers and the flushed driver retreats to hide his embarrassment in the darkened engine room of the M41.
I arrive at Szeged a few minutes past midday and walk into town to find the TourInform office. There is no map outside the station, but my research has provided general directions and fifteen minutes later I am standing outside the office: it is closed. I spend the next hour walking round the old town and a good deal of the newer town but can find nowhere to stay for less than two days budget. A cold wind whips of the Great Hungarian Plain, rattling street signs and chasing litter along the gutters. There is nothing to see in town, nothing that would make it an attractive place to explore, and there is a frightening number of impoverished and homeless beggars, many of which look as if they have crossed the nearby Romanian border. It is the last place in Hungary, literally and metaphorically, that I would care to spend time in, the very end of South-Central Europe. I walk back to the station and buy a ticket for the Bucaresti-Budapest EuroCity.
The train is full to capacity even this early in its journey; there are no seats, so I stand in the corridor. More and more people pile onto the train at every stop, until the corridors, connecting gangways – even the toilets – are shoulder to shoulder and crammed with luggage. Somehow the conductor still manages to squeeze through and frowns as he inspects my ticket. He slashes two diagonal lines across it, turns it over and writes 3950 Forints on the back, holding his hand out for the money. The ticket clerk in Szeged has booked me onto a later InterCity departure, even though I specified EC and have been charged the supplement. I try to explain this to the conductor, but he is insistent and produces his timetable, pointing out the difference between my ticket and the train number in his book. I tell him I have no money, producing a few travellers cheques to back up my deceit, but he ignores this plea and handwrites a new ticket. I refuse to take the ticket and adopt a tactic I have seen people just like this Hungarian ticket inspector use many times: I shrug, shake my head, and look out of the window – it is not my problem; it is not possible.
After three hours standing in the corridor I arrive at Keleti Palyaudvar. Through the carriage window I see the ticket inspector already on the platform, talking to two mean looking policemen, pointing to his book and scanning the mass of faces pouring off the train. I walk two coaches forward and find a door directly opposite the side entrance to Baross Ter, walk quickly out of the station, turn right, follow its length then turn right again back into the station and join the crowd of people descending the Metro stairs. I expect to hear a shout or feel a restraining hand on my arm, but there is nothing, my escape a success. I catch M2 to Deak Ter and change for M3 to Nagyvarad Ter; I walk to the pension I have used previously and they give me a room at a discounted rate – not through any loyalty, but to fill one of the 27 vacancies they have. I eat in the Etterem which has now moved inside from the summer terrace and contemplate the unsettling effect 10 hours on a train has on the digestive system; and that I am nearing the end of my journey on the railways of central Europe.