The low-key glamour of watching the sunset in the buffet car and being woken with a bowl of porridge just can’t be beat
I
s there anything more glamorous than an overnight train? Even when you’re climbing aboard wearing your husband’s raincoat, carrying an oat-encrusted car seat, with a six-month-old in a sling and an apple core fermenting gently and secretly in the side pocket of your rucksack?
Not that I know of. I love travelling by train – even now, when it’s as comprehensively bad as British rail privatisation has made it for, well, just about everyone save a few shareholders and the CEO of Pumpkin Cafe. But travelling at night? With the whisper of romance in the buffet car, the flash of sunset from the vestibule and a white-sheeted bunk bed to call your own? I love it even more.
Fourteen minutes before being invited on to the night train from London to Penzance, you would have found me in the customer lounge, eating shortbread and drinking apple juice like a woman who has just been told she must consume 7,000 calories in 15 minutes or the whole of Paddington station is going to blow. Luckily, I wasn’t averting an extremely specific act of terrorism; I was just getting my money’s worth because, let me tell you, night trains aren’t cheap. My husband and son managed to get to Italy and back by rail for less than it cost me to cross the Tamar on Great Western Rail.
