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Train travel is better for the environment. It’s a pinnacle of the slow travel movement. You can watch the world go by while getting a glimpse into a simpler life. It’s cool. All valid considerations, but not what prompted my long, long trip on Europe’s railways.
There were two main reasons: a healthy loathing of airports and discovering that Interrail was still a thing. It was on a plane (the irony) that we got talking to an older couple who’d just crossed Europe by train for about the same price as a return from London to Manchester.
Interrail! I thought that a) it had been banjaxed by Brexit, and b) it was the preserve of the under-25s. Turns out neither of these things is true. Hold me back.
After Hannibal-crossing-the-Alps levels of planning, the trip went like this: London, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Modena, Bologna and Naples. And then Villa San Giovanni where the train splits in two to go to Sicily — by ferry. This is one of the last passenger trains to do this, and when I first heard about it, it blew my mind. Bucket-list item, even if the reality turned out to be a little more municipal than mind-blowing.
So I set out on a trip of chaotic stations, many trains, occasional platform panic — and a lot of railway food. Things started badly. I usually avoid the offerings on Eurostar having endured their gruel of a risotto, but still somehow found myself in possession of a cheese and ham baguette so clammy and impacted, it bent like a foam aeroplane pillow. From this point on, though, each train opened a box of buffet-car delights.
There were menus from big-name chefs. On the leg to Geneva, “the best of French and Swiss produce” came via Michel Roth (of the city’s Michelin-starred Bayview restaurant). In a modular café carriage with tall plastic tables, it was impossible to resist Roth’s confit de canard with pommes de terre sarladaises in what looked like a glass-lidded confit jar. Nothing but duck, potatoes, aromatics, duck fat, salt — not an additive in sight. In its fragrant, beige uniformity, it tasted like real food, actual cooking, ringing with duck fat, rosemary and garlic.
Oh the glamour of the speedy Frecciarossa, racing from Bologna to Naples, where nattily uniformed staff served tiny sweetish rolls filled with cheese and ham (like the ones you get in Florence’s Procacci) direct to our luxurious seats. And the moustachioed ticket inspector looked like a matinee idol. The celebrity chef here was Carlo Cracco of Italian MasterChef, and there were hot dishes on offer — black rice with mazzancolle (big prawns) with curry and cumin, perhaps? — but I settled for some very good prosciutto crudo served with fennel bread and a half bottle of fizz. And to think my train snacks in the UK are usually a Twix and a tea bag.
My favourite snack came from the Geneva-to-Milan leg, on a train furnished with that rarity, a tableclothed dining car: a deep cup laden with hot little smoked sausages, laced with cornichons and pickled onions and served with a tube of mustard — all admiration for the bald simplicity. I could have had steak tartare or a wonderfully Swiss dish of macaroni topped with minced beef, fried onions, apple sauce and Sbrinz cheese. But those wee sausages, heaven. Three more hours on this train wouldn’t have been a chore, dreaming my way through a dramatic landscape of mountains, of lakes draped with a haunting veil of smoke.
What other method of travel offers such fun? That costs, for the whole trip, about £350 a head — including Eurostar and first class from Paris onward? That allows you to take advantage of a station change in Paris to bathe in the beauty — and now, pretty decent cooking — of Le Train Bleu at Gare de Lyon. To gawp at foreign stations’ food concessions: hello, nachos swamped with liquid cheese at The Bloody Bar in Geneva; Gamberini in Bologna and its little buns filled with roasted aubergine; the designer taralli at Napoli Centrale. Then to grab an arancino from a ferry’s pleasingly surly cafeteria while the train awaits on a deck below.
And — hallelujah — when you stop off in Modena, having scored a table at Osteria Francescana, one of the world’s great restaurants, you can drink. Cin cin!
Next year, I’m planning a more northerly trip: Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna . . . This time, I’ll pack smarter: the adventure’s only downside was heaving large, overstuffed cases from platform to platform. I sincerely hope and trust there will be sausages.
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