Europe > Italy > Lazio > Rome > Train > Articles > Letting the train take the strain

Oh, the effortless elegance of rail travel. White linen in the dining car, watching the sun set over the Tuscan coast, then golden slumbers all the way to Paris, lulled by the clackety-clack of the wheels on the track. My family, when I outlined this original way of getting to from Rome to Brighton, were less enthusiastic.

“It'll be an adventure,” I told them.

“It'll be twenty-six hours door-to-door if we're lucky”, said my wife. “Also - it costs about fifty per cent more than the cheapest flight.”

“Via Brussels airport,” chipped in my ten-year-old daughter, “where they sell Belgian chocolates.”

“It'll be adventure,” I ordered, and so it was.

5.30pm, Tuesday, Rome: halfway through packing, I realize that our hugely heavy trunk will not disappear along a Magic Conveyor Belt for the best part of our journey; instead we (meaning I) will have to lug it. Reluctantly, I remove my almost new pair of roller blades.

6.45pm: taxi to Rome's Termini station.

7.30 pm: on the train, in our three-man (or rather three-dwarf) berth. What if the air-conditioning isn't working? Soon we will be drinking chilled Sancerre in the dining car.

7.35pm: our cheery conductor pops his head around the door. I ask if we need to book for dinner.

“Can if you like,” he replies, then, with perfect comic timing, “but it wouldn't do you much good: the catering staff are on a forty-day strike.”

8.30pm: after the tears and sulks have subsided, we share a simple repast of cheese and onion crisps.

10pm: lights out; a spot of bunk acrobatics (a demonstration sport at this year's Olympics) has cheered Clara up no end.

11pm-5am: lie awake, tossing and turning, listening to the clackety-clack of the wheels on the track and voices in distant stations. When the voices start speaking French, I decide this is getting ridiculous.

5am-7.30am: unconsciousness

7.30am, Wednesday, Somewhere in France: cheery conductor wakes us to tell us that the train's running ninety minutes late, and that we can go back to sleep if we like. The child next door - a late developer - has discovered bunk acrobatics.

9am: breakfast - a plastic croissant and some equally inorganic biscuits, washed down with coffee that is close to being drinkable, but Not Quite There. The scent of “told you so” hangs heavy in the air. I promise my by now sceptical family a slap-up lunch in Paris.

11.20 am, Paris: wait in a queue for a taxi at Gare De Lyon

11.55 am: wait in a queue for the left luggage counter at the Gare St-Lazare

12.07 pm: discover we have exactly an hour and 23 minutes before the train to Dieppe leaves. Mustering my meagre knowledge of the 8th arrondissement, I remember a museum on the Boulevard Haussman that had a rather good cafe-restaurant attached.

12.25pm: underneath a fresco by Tiepolo, we tuck into a delicious brunch at the Musee Jacquemart-Andre, looking out over a curving loggia. All is well with the world: we eat, and overeat, and order - at last - that chilled Sancerre.

“Wouldn't get this on a plane, would you?” I crow. My wife and daughter give me a funny look.

Off the train to Dieppe, and the delights of that port town, with its all-you-can-carry bottle shops, and the three-hour ‘fast’ ferry to Newhaven, with its tea and Mars Bars and duty free and screaming kids, and the blasted heath that is Newhaven train station at 8pm on a Saturday, and the minicab that eventually took us to Hurstpierpoint, I will not here discuss. We arrived at 9.15pm, twenty-seven-and-a-half hours after leaving Rome, and were greeted by my wife's mother with the immortal words, “Oh - I thought you were coming tomorrow”.

Next time, we fly.

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