TAKING THE TRAIN THROUGH EUROPE? I’LL PASS
Charles Nevin discovers that Interrail bargains aren’t just for the young — so he heads through northern Europe to Stockholm
The train to Utrecht was full, even by Jeremy Corbyn’s standards. The ticket inspector was typically unfazed, and full of multilingual bonhomie (the Dutch are a jolly lot). He examined our ticket and said, “Ah, yes: the Brexit tour.” Well, up to a point: we were indeed on a rail excursion to northern Europe, but regrets or good riddances were not our first interest. Terminally fed up with the claustrophobic frenzy of airports and planes, we had decided to make a journey by ferry and train to meet my wife’s Norwegian cousins in that far EU outpost, Stockholm. And, to our ignorant bliss, we had discovered the continuing existence of that fabled 20th-century student friend, the Interrail Pass. Not only that: you probably knew, but we didn’t, that they now have the senior pass for those aged 60 and over with a 10% discount. The denim may have faded, but the wanderlust lingers on, qualified, naturally, by that sensible respect for comfort that is one of the advantages of age.
MISTY MEMORIES OF YOUTH
Clattering endlessly through the night because it was cheaper to sleep on the train, the faithful rucksack pressed into service as a lumpy pillow yet again; frantic dashes from brief encounters for trains already left; eking out the loaf of bread and sad bit of cheese ... some things are better left as fond memories, or to the young.
No, we were very happy, thank you, to make a rather more leisurely trip to Sweden and back, with two-night booked hotel stays along the way fitting easily into the 10 days’ travel a month permitted (£307).
The itinerary took us from the West Country to Harwich and on to Rotterdam; then Cologne, Lübeck, a ferry to Copenhagen and then under and over the Baltic by bridge and tunnel up to Stockholm.
The London-to-Rotterdam leg was a separate ticket (from £356 overnight for two) with the Dutchflyer rail and ferry service. See stenaline.co.uk.
LAND OF WATER AND BICYCLES
It was with hopeful hearts that we set off on our great adventure, Interrail passes ready. In an enjoyable echo of the past, each journey has to be entered by hand in the “travel diary” attached to the pass, which commanded wary respect on our first two trains.
At Paddington, having failed to realise it bore one of those code thingies that opened the ticket barriers, I approached the inspector at the side. “We have come from Frome on an Interrail pass,” I informed him. “Fantastic,” he said, in that deadpan London way I still miss, before waving us through.
The trip to Harwich from Liverpool Street Station was noticeably devoid of livery and leather luggage, but not unpleasant.
Heading for our ferry in the near-empty Harwich International, it was almost possible to miss that airport buzz, near treachery soon abated by the easy passage through security.
Europe’s trains seem no better or worse than British trains: different rolling stock, same crowding, similar punctuality. Slightly more difficult climbing on with luggage and stowing it: we should have taken smaller suitcases, though it was most heartening how ready young people were to help, especially if you got in their way.
Rotterdam is a fine city, with the usual large Dutch amounts of water and bicycles. The Dutch are loud, friendly and have a relish for the drink. And the Netherlands are very neat: neat houses, neat towns, neat countryside. We whizzed on past Arnhem and over the Rhine.
WONDERFUL COPENHAGEN
Cologne is not neat. It is scruffy. And the mighty, magnificent cathedral, more abstract than Gaudí, still looks as soot-blackened as it did standing alone in 1944, all other buildings destroyed by RAF bombing.
Lübeck, the old Hanseatic port in the former duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, is another inconvenient reminder of the efficient ruthlessness of the RAF. Standing in the (rebuilt, again) St Mary’s Church, and contemplating the bells, crashed, broken and lying where they fell on Palm Sunday, 1942, the old argument that they started it struggles, even if Coventry was the response; and one can only admire the fineness of the sad irony that the same raid destroyed Bernt Notke’s astonishing medieval Dance of Death.
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen: actually, Frank Loesser, who wrote the song, had never visited Copenhagen, though he did enjoy it when he finally got there.
The scholarly ticket clerk at Copenhagen station enjoyed telling us that another visitor, Admiral Nelson, had launched the first European terror attack as much as he enjoyed being told this was rich coming from a Viking.
CAPITAL OF SCANDINAVIA
A city of almost perfect scale and setting and harmony, town and wide harbour, stirringly old and thrillingly modern, and all presided over by the charming, stylish Danes. I’d like to say the same of Stockholm, which has a similarly spectacular harbour setting, but something stops me, probably the Norwegian cousins. (Norway and Sweden have had a relationship not dissimilar to that of England and Scotland, with the balance currently to the west — all that oil.) Stockholm is undoubtedly impressive, but there is a grandiosity not to all tastes, and not helped, said the cousins, by the city’s current marketing slogan: “Stockholm, Capital of Scandinavia”.
But it did provide one of those magic moments of modern tourism, as on a crowded Saturday afternoon, Swedish Hare Krishnas danced and sang loudly past the great grey royal palace and bemused tourists, halting in front of a restaurant called, delightfully, Pickwicks. Dickens would have loved it.
And Brexit? Not a ferment. As a German architect put it to me in Copenhagen: “Well, we don’t wake up thinking about it every day.”
Oh, and the final good news: Interrail promises to be unaffected by the Great Departure to the Unknown Destination. See interrail.eu