If on a winter’s night a traveller is about to board a train, a fortifying drink is of the essence. Thus it was that I stood in line at Burger King, on the concourse at Central Station, in Glasgow, and asked for a hot tea. The only reason that I wasn’t seeking out a dram of whiskey was that I had already done so, dropping into a pub on my way to the station. In short, I was well drammed up—as was the Glaswegian beside me, who leaned on the counter and inquired what I was up to. Taking the Caledonian Sleeper to London, I replied. He fixed me with a canny eye and said, “Are you not afraid o’ the wee virus?”
The answer, foolishly, was no. I was too excited by the thought o’ catching the wee train to be worried about catching anything else. It was late evening, on February 28th; the year would soon leap into the twenty-ninth, and that touch of temporal rarity added to the occasion. The departure of a night train—by definition, a humdrum event for the station staff—exudes, for all but the most jaded travellers, the thrill of an unfamiliar ritual. By day, if late, you run for a train; if early, you tut and sigh at having to tarry so long. At night, on the other hand, you saunter, and deliberately show up in good time. Why? Not because of security, passport control, or the other chores that affront the airline passenger, shortening tempers and sapping every soul, but because you want to settle in and enjoy the show. Patiently, the train awaits you, with a theatrical air of suspense, and the moment of its leaving is akin to the curtain’s rise. T. S. Eliot, for one, knew the moment well:
That is the opening of “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat,” from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” published in 1939. Skimbleshanks, with his “glass-green eyes,” is a calming and supervising presence on the London-to-Glasgow line. His train departs, like mine, at twenty minutes to midnight, and he, too, consumes a cup of tea en route, “with perhaps a drop of Scotch.” As for Eliot’s account of the sleeping compartments, not much has changed:
If you want to teach a child the basics of onomatopoeia (and who doesn’t?), the clickety-lickety-clack of Eliot’s meter is a pretty good place to start. When I first read the poem, at the age of eight or nine, I thought that the chime of “basin” and “face in” was the funniest rhyme of all time. Decades later, and in spite of hot competition from Byron’s terminal couplets in “Don Juan,” I stand by my choice. All the more gratifying to discover that, in my very neat berth on the Caledonian Sleeper, I would, indeed, be in a position to wash my face in a basin.
But what position is that? In a word: hunched. Wide-open spaces, remember, are those green or rocky things outside a train, designed to be stared at through the window. Inside, all roaming is restricted. Only very seldom can you swing a cat, even if you can find a cat who agrees to be swung, and how, exactly, James Bond and his SPECTRE-trained adversary made room in a sleeping compartment for mortal combat, in “From Russia with Love,” I have no idea.
As for suitcases, don’t bother. To embark with bulky baggage is asking for trouble, and, should it come to a scrap between you and your Samsonite, you will lose. Hence the contents of my rucksack on the Caledonian Sleeper, whittled to the bare necessities: toothbrush, toothpaste, Turgenev, T-shirt, underwear, and socks. When turning from the window to the door, in my compartment, I had to revolve on the spot, as if roasting on a vertical spit, and, despite my being the sole occupant, both bunks had been let down, locked into place, and joined by a ladder. A printed notice offered advice: “Guests should use the ladders in the traditional manner, by always facing the bed as they climb up and down.” What other manner is there? Had the train recently hosted the cast of Cirque du Soleil, perhaps, who insisted on descending head first, arms outstretched, after crooking one knee over the top rung?
No less baffling was the Room Service Menu. Pies, cheeses, broth, smoked venison on a platter, and a parade of wines and spirits: all these, and more, could be ferried to one’s bedside. Caledoniaphiles were urged to dine on “Haggis, Neeps & Tatties”—neeps meaning turnips, tatties meaning potatoes, and haggis meaning all your deepest terrors wrapped up in a sphere of stomach skin, then boiled. Precisely what you want to snack on, in other words, while passing through a tunnel at half past two in the morning. The entire feast could be washed down with a Ginger Laddie. Don’t ask.
Thirty-five years ago, I had taken the same line, in the opposite direction. A very different experience: no neeps, no Wi-Fi, no bed. The service was then known as the Night Rider, and the ride would not have disgraced a rodeo. A bunch of us, all students, huddled and shifted in seats that felt as laid-back as lampposts. Daring sallies were launched to the onboard bar. We grabbed, on average, fourteen winks, and, at journey’s end, staggered forth into a Scottish dawn so bleak that it froze the bones.
You can still buy plain seats on the Caledonian Sleeper, and they cost a fraction of the single or double rooms. The economics of night trains, in Europe and elsewhere, rest on two basic theorems. First, the closer you adhere to the perpendicular, the less you pay. An upright vigil in the corridor, during which you stare into the darkness and contemplate the infinite, is dirt cheap. Second, once you do lie flat, communal flatness is better value than solitude. The standard compromise is the couchette, a compartment fitted with four or six bunks: fun for a family, and rousingly unpredictable when you get tossed into a stew of strangers. Urban legends abound. Hands are said to reach up from the bunk beneath you, in response to your telltale snores, and deftly extract your wallet. And I once heard of a roving youth who, ensconced with newfound companions in a friendly couchette, was offered a cup of coffee in southern Bulgaria and woke up, two days later, in a quiet siding outside Thessaloniki, devoid of every possession except his boxer shorts. You just don’t get that level of service on a plane.
Not that high-end sleepers are devoid of risk. Habitués of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, for example, which, in defiance of its name, can shuttle you from Paris to Istanbul, are encouraged to “trade stories with fellow travellers in the Bar Car as the pianist plays.” Imagine hearing the same anecdote, from the same retired fund manager, all the way across a continent. Should you book the Cabin Suite, “formed of two interconnecting Double Cabins,” you will be granted the unique opportunity for a blazing, champagne-fuelled argument with your beloved on the first night. Having slammed the connecting door, both of you can then sulk in ultimate luxury for five long days, and all for thirty-seven thousand dollars. Each.
There’s no disguising the itch that drives the Caledonian Sleeper. It wants to be a hotel. Such is the lofty ambition on which the principle of the sleeping car is based. The pioneer of that principle was George Pullman. Not since Monsieur Guillotin came up with a device for making decapitation more user-friendly has an individual been so closely associated with a product. Pullman, born in 1831, was an engineer whose idea of a challenge was to jack up whole buildings in the mud-bound streets of Chicago, allowing drainage systems to be installed underneath. A similar aversion to mess and inconvenience was one of the motives that spurred him to introduce the Pullman sleeping car, in 1859. Ladies and gentlemen, he reasoned, would pay to travel in comfort; the plusher the comfort, the more swiftly his clients might forget that they were travelling at all. On his much improved model, of 1865, the upholstered seats were indeed covered in plush, to accompany the brass fittings and the walnut walls.
As if to demonstrate that nothing, not even tragedy, could interrupt the national genius for entrepreneurship, the funeral train that carried the body of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, included a Pullman car on the final leg of its journey. By then, the train, which had crossed seven states, had become a story unto itself. The market followed the mourning, and, in 1867, the Pullman Palace Car Company was founded. The wealthy, and the aspiring middle classes, were offered the chance to sleep in peace, on the move, much as their national hero had been borne to his eternal rest. The deal would be sealed when his eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was made president of Pullman, in 1897, and then, in 1911, chairman of the board.
The gradual upgrading of Pullman cars can be read as a fever chart of consumers’ wants. In 1887, a vestibule was inaugurated which allowed smooth access from one carriage to another and led to such delights as the drawing room and the smoking room, aromatic with domesticity. Women travellers, growing in number, were provided with dressing rooms. Air-conditioning began to flow in 1929, and the nineteen-thirties saw the début of the Duplex and the Roomette—not a word that I could nerve myself to utter in front of a booking clerk, but, qua period detail, it has the right snap and click. In “Night Trains,” a lovingly erudite book of 2017, Andrew Martin reports that Pullman cars were also “equipped with hairdressing salons, organs (for church services) and libraries.” When a train can meet every private and civic need, why would you ever get off?
Of particular note, throughout this process, was the deployment of the beds. In America, the custom was to place them lengthways, so that your body, when horizontal, slotted into the train like a bullet in the breech of a rifle. If you want to see this arrangement at work, its neatness crying out for comic disruption, I refer you to “Some Like It Hot,” in which Sweet Sue and her band, topped by a singer named Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), take the sleeper from Chicago to Florida. Arrayed on either side of the car’s central corridor are ranks of bunks, upper and lower, each of them guarded, demurely but uselessly, by curtains. A nocturnal party is thrown in bunk No. 7, with Manhattans mixed in a rubber hot-water bottle. You can keep your Orient Express.
In Europe, on the other hand, bunks on a night train have traditionally been set at ninety degrees to the direction of travel, like the teeth of a comb. (Of the many gulfs between the Old World and the New, this could be the most bewildering. Do American passengers, made of sterner purpose, prefer the thrustful sensation of being propelled?) A photograph from 1888 shows a private compartment, with two of the transverse bunks in place and primed for action. Every surface, including the floor and the mattresses, is sumptuously patterned and softened, as if to induce a languid hush. The name for such a haven was a “boudoir car,” and you can see why, for it breathes what one prim and titled Englishwoman scorned as “the atmosphere of vulgar depravity” that prevailed on trains de luxe. Her name, by the way, was Lady Chatterley.
To pick your way through the vestiges of the great European trains is a task not so much for historians of transport as for paleontologists. It is a lost world, in which Tsar Nicholas II could have a cow car, if you please, attached to his personal train on a visit to Germany, to keep the imperial children furnished with fresh milk. The landscape of this Trainaceous Era was crammed with rogues, chancers, visionaries, and tightfisted despots. Meet Colonel William d’Alton Mann, formerly of the Fifth Michigan Cavalry, who devised the boudoir car; King Boris of Bulgaria, who wore white overalls and stood next to the engine driver for hours on end, aflame with train lust; and Georges Nagelmackers, the indefatigable Belgian who founded La Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (et des Grands Express Européens) at the age of twenty-seven. The trains running under that banner were majestic beasts, and some of the dominant predators are listed by Andrew Martin:
That epoch, restlessly opulent, has long since faded to a close, but no matter. Blessed with a chronicler of consummate gifts, it survives and dazzles on the page:
That is Vladimir Nabokov, in “Speak, Memory.” It couldn’t be anyone else. His family, in pre-revolutionary Russia, caught trains as he did butterflies, and fled to the Crimea by railroad when Lenin came to power; Nabokov claims to have worn spats and a derby on board, as if refusing to be traumatized out of his elegance. The hillside lights of his childhood return with especial brilliance in “Glory,” a novel too often overlooked. Its hero, Martin Edelweiss, spots a similar “necklace of lights,” we are told, from his vantage point on a night train, in southern France. On a whim, he gets off at the next station, with the train “exhaling a sigh,” and asks about the source of the illumination. Told that it is a village called Molignac, he walks up there, and spends a while toiling in the fields, before retracing his steps to the valley below and boarding the night express. He looks for his lights:
But why take a night train at all? Why not fly, drive, or apply to your nearest genie for a magic-carpet ride, preferably with a seat on the aisle? The best reason was supplied by my godfather, who was a military attaché in Moscow during the nineteen-eighties. If he wished to go to Leningrad by train, tickets would be issued to him only for travel at night. Daylight, which might have afforded a view of sensitive installations, was off limits.
Lesser mortals, with duller jobs, have three reasons to choose a sleeper train. The first of these is logistical. Say you work at the Stock Exchange in Milan. You have a meeting booked for Tuesday, September 8th, this year, in central Paris, at noon. (Because you are an optimist and a tough guy, and because you are currently hiding in your apartment, subsisting on macaroni from your pantry, and no longer able to take your shirts across town to be laundered by your ninety-year-old mother, you expect to remain virus-free.) You have a choice: air or rail? Air means an early start, with a taxi to Milan’s Linate Airport, and the 08:25 Alitalia flight on Tuesday morning. Eighty-five dollars in coach, but, hey, someone else is paying, and the idea of being divided from the proletariat by a nylon curtain still gives you a weird kick, so a business seat it is. Three hundred and fifty bucks.
To go by rail, by contrast, involves dining at home, then catching the ten-past-eleven on Monday night, from Milan’s central station. Again, your own space, with a sleeping compartment to yourself, will be expensive, at two hundred and seventy dollars. If you don’t mind sharing with another man, however, the price plummets to ninety-three dollars. A steal. Unfortunately, you do mind, since that other man, in your shuddering imagination, is sure to be a catarrhal insomniac with complex gastric issues and featherlight fingers. A stealer.
So, in terms of cost, the plane and the train match up. The same goes for arrival times: 09:50 at Orly Airport, or thirteen minutes earlier at the Gare de Lyon, not far from the Place de la Bastille. And there’s the rub. Most night trains insert you into the core of a city, whereas planes deposit you, at best, on the outer rind. A cab into Paris from Orly (or, more irritating still, from Charles de Gaulle Airport), at rush hour, is the antithesis of fun, and you may not fancy the schlep by public transport. Alight from the night train, though, and you will find le Tout-Paris, ready to greet you. Being in no hurry, you amble along the platform to breakfast in a restaurant so royally gilded, on the walls and ceilings, that the yolk of your poached egg will shine like the sun.
The second reason to travel by night train is flygskam. The word means “flight shame” in Swedish, and denotes the guilt that gnaws—or should rightfully gnaw—at your vitals when you realize that, by nipping from Berlin to Ibiza on EasyJet, say, for a skull-jolting weekend on the dance floor, you will, however indirectly, hasten the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. If you can spread the shame, forcing celebrities to charter their own yachts in a fit of conscience, so much the better. The vice of flying, thus exposed, has spawned a reciprocal virtue: tågskryt, or “train brag,” as practiced by those who not only swap the skies for the railroad but, having made the sacrifice, go on Instagram and tell their friends about it.
The science is solid. If our Milanese broker flies to Paris (a distance of around four hundred miles), he will—not personally, of course, unless he asked for a second helping of osso buco the night before—release one hundred kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s not counting the taxi rides to Linate Airport at one end and from Orly at the other, probably in a fuming snarl of traffic. Should he go overnight by train, the journey will be more circuitous, and maybe thirty miles longer, but the CO2 output will be under four kilos. That’s quite a difference, and it’s genuinely hard to spot a downside, unless it’s the annoying halo of ethical self-satisfaction atop our traveller’s head.
Will flygskam have any lasting effect on commercial enterprise? The signs are (or were, before the advent of COVID-19) distinctly promising. A new Nightjet train from Vienna to Brussels, established by Austrian Federal Railways, or Ö.B.B., and lauded by its C.E.O., Andreas Matthä, as “an eco-friendly travel option to the E.U. capital,” had its inaugural run on January 19th. A serious journey, at just over fourteen hours. Ö.B.B. estimates that the rest of its night network has already saved the world twelve thousand short-haul flights a year: a delicious irony, given how greedily the budget airlines have eaten into train travel in recent decades. Further resurrections lie ahead, not least new sleeper services from Vienna and Munich to Amsterdam, slated for December of this year. One can but hope that such enviable schemes, intended to address the climate crisis, will not be stopped in their tracks by the rival plight through which we currently sweat.
The third reason to choose a sleeper train—and the most compelling—is no more practical than the taste of a peach. At stake, you might say, is a sense of latent adventure. Although it is unlikely, as you clatter through the night, that anything of note will befall you, the prospect that it could feels ever present, just out of sight beyond the next curve of the track. To remain awake to that possibility, even as we’re meant to be sleeping, is the privilege that beckons some of us back, year after year, to this awkward and beguiling locomotion.
No wonder trains and movies make such cozy bedfellows—so cozy that a train zipping through the darkness, with windows illuminated, actually looks like a strip of film. Plots, laid down on rails, dash ever onward; anticipation rises like steam. Consider Claudette Colbert, in “The Palm Beach Story,” who falls in with the rowdy millionaires of the Ale and Quail Club. Sweeping her up as a mascot, and boarding the 11:58 from Penn Station with a pack of hounds, they think nothing of firing their shotguns at crackers, tossed up by a bar steward like clay pigeons. As for Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” the lady in question is a grandmotherly secret agent, who, before she disappears, daubs her name on the misted window of the dining car. A ridiculous method, in any other time and place, of leaving your mark; on a night train, though, it seems only right and proper.
If you don’t believe me, you have to believe Cary Grant. In “North by Northwest” (more Hitchcock), he boards the Twentieth Century, from New York to Chicago, without a ticket. By chance—or so he thinks—he meets Eva Marie Saint, first in the corridor and then in the dining car, where he orders a Gibson and, on her recommendation, the brook trout. The two of them return to her compartment, where, during a police inspection, she conceals Grant in the foldaway top bunk. Later, as daylight fails, they lean against the wall of the compartment and kiss, over and over, her hands caressing the back of his neck. “Beats flying, doesn’t it?” he says to her. Sure does.
Sleeping on a sleeper is easier said than done. In “I Know Where I’m Going!,” a magical film from 1945, the heroine, played by Wendy Hiller, caught the night train from Manchester to Glasgow, heading for her wedding in the Western Isles. And she definitely slept—lying in her compartment and dreaming of tartan-shrouded hills, as her bridal dress, hung on a rack, swayed with the motion of the train. But those dreams were bustling affairs, intercut with shots of pistons and wheels, and she arrived more panicked than refreshed. Thirty years later, in “Murder on the Orient Express,” the same actress became a veiled and tremulous grande dame, plunging a blade into the murderee before the train was halted by snow. It’s as if night trains, explicitly designed to aid slumber, implied too many other activities, beginning with love and death, to be truly soporific.
The ideal state, I would argue, is a delirious doze, peppered with fits and starts—the doze, for instance, of Anna Karenina, who gets a seat but no bed on her journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The snow outside is in tumult, but the compartment is heated by a stove: “She passed the paper-knife over the window pane, then laid its smooth, cool surface to her cheek.” You can almost hear it hiss. Anna falls into a fevered reverie, from which she emerges only as the train pulls into a station. Such is the paradox that awaits the night-train novice: you sleep on the go, and you wake when you stop. (Anyone who has rocked a cradle will second this observation.) In the early pages of “Stamboul Train,” whose narrative puffs from Ostend to Constantinople, Graham Greene points out this peculiar hiccup in the laws of physics: “In the rushing reverberating express, noise was so regular that it was the equivalent of silence, movement was so continuous that after a while the mind accepted it as stillness.” Do the minds of sailors accommodate themselves, with equal ease, to a raging sea?
I first had a chance to test Greene’s thesis on a pre-university pilgrimage from London to Athens, by rail, with a halfway break at Salzburg. Thereafter lay terra incognita, for the Communist bloc was still intact. I was travelling solo, in a couchette of six; my fellow-coucheurs were smugglers, brazenly lugging bags of Western luxuries—lipstick, nylons, and coffee—across the frontier into what was then Yugoslavia. I assumed that they had bribed the conductor, who padded up and down the car in socks, and left us largely alone. The date must have been mid-May, 1981, for an assassin had just tried to kill the Pope: an event of such weight that the smugglers and I, who shared no common language, reënacted the crime en route. (Surprisingly, they had no gun among them, so I was shot by a lit cigarette.) Having commandeered the upper berth, I lay there, reading “Wuthering Heights,” drifting off, and lurching awake, bereft of my bearings, whenever the train paused. I recall tugging the edge of the blind, peering out into first light, and seeing an old woman, quite still, with a bundle of sticks on her back. It was as if we had taken a branch line into the world of Brueghel.
How long it was before the weary train crawled into Larissa station, in Athens, I don’t know. But the minutiae of those days and nights (insofar as I can tell them apart) are filed away forever in my brain. A journey by sleeper demands to be remembered, whereas an overnight flight is something you want to forget. Though the former may deposit you, benumbed, on a strange platform at a wretched hour, you somehow feel emboldened and ready to roll, whereas the latter leaves you curdled with misanthropy, watching everyone’s luggage but yours go round and round on a joyless carrousel. Red-eye is so much worse than gray-face.
Last month, I found myself in Lisbon. It was Monday, March 9th. The coronavirus, busy with northern Italy, had yet to turn its attention to Portugal, and the capital was still well peopled. On the Praça do Comércio, a handsome square that flanks the north shore of the Tagus River, cafés were doing a brisk trade, though the clamor dipped as I walked northeast, into the small streets that wind and climb through the Alfama district. With the descent of dusk, my senses woke up. This would be my last chance to meander before the borders closed, and everything was heightened and charged. I smelled the orange trees beside the cathedral before I saw them, and the vinho tinto I drank at dinner had a potency greater than anything recorded on its label. Besides, I had a train to catch, to Madrid, and the inevitable broken night ahead, so the urge to fill up was not to be resisted. Roasted blood sausage in green wine? Bring it on.
The stroll from the Alfama to Santa Apolónia railroad station takes you past a museum devoted to fado, that noble strain of Portuguese song which, more closely than any other musical form, approximates the human sob. To be honest, I was convinced, on arriving at the station, that the employees had just come back from a three-hour fado rehearsal down the road. Never have I seen a sorrier crew. Wandering to and fro like unburied souls in the underworld, they wore the saddest uniform known to man: gray suit, gray shirt, gray tie, and gray shoes. I half expected them to leave a trail of ash. My fellow-passengers were few; one of them, laden with plastic bags, claimed to have been burgled before leaving her rental apartment, and asked to borrow twenty euros. The first thing that greeted me, as I boarded, was not a smiling steward but the lavish tang of drains. It was one of those nights.
We pulled away, and, as I stood at the door of my carriage, in fond valediction, something occurred to me: the door was open. The platform slid by, quickening, a single step away. Maybe this was company practice, assigning responsibility to customers. If so, what else were we bidden to do? Toot the whistle? Make the beds? In case there were children aboard, I swung the door shut. With a heavy clang, it locked; the handle snapped upward and struck my middle finger. I was bleeding under my nail, swearing like a stoker, and we hadn’t even left the station. Who says that the romance of travel is dead?
The ensuing night had not a shred of glamour. No snowdrift brought the engine to a halt. No spies, to my knowledge, were spirited on or off the train. No unnamed strangers accosted me, entrusted me with vital papers, or proposed a dry Martini. The sole occupants of the refreshment car were three of the gray men, and their mood bore no relation to that of the Ale and Quail. At half past six in the morning, tiptoeing to the far end of my carriage, I found another door open. It revealed the interior of a compartment, and there, on the bottom bunk, lay the conductor, fully dressed, face down. For a second, I’m sorry to say, I was disappointed not to see the richly inlaid hilt of a dagger protruding from between his shoulder blades. In truth, he was not murdered but merely napping, presumably having wept himself to sleep.
Such was the non-event of the journey. Yet I relished every mile of it, pulling wide the curtains at the witching hour, as I brushed my teeth, to disclose a vacant platform and the sign “Caxarias–Fátima” in a glowing haze; leaving them open as I lay on the bed, thus admitting the searchlight of the full moon; and, at last, stepping out into a Madrid morning as fresh as rising dough. At nine o’clock, on the south side of the Prado, beside the Botanical Garden, three or four citizens walked their dogs in the crisp air. An hour later, I entered the museum, and spent my final stretch of liberty, more or less alone, in the company of Titian and Veronese. A few days afterward, the global lockdown began.
None of us, even those who evade contagion, will be left unmarked by the ordeal. Lives that hang fire are hard to tend. My guess, for what it’s worth, is that armchair travellers will manage better than most; railroad fanatics, their desktops thronged with timetables, are happy to plan elaborate itineraries that they know they may never pursue, across lands that they have no intention of visiting. I doubt whether I shall ever take the Andean Explorer, featuring “in-built oxygen for additional comfort at high altitudes,” from Cusco to Puno, and get woken up, at sunrise, for a bleary squint at Lake Titicaca.
I do mean to make for Sweden, though, once the viral fog has lifted, and to voyage from toe to top—from Malmö, in the south, up to Narvik, just over the Norwegian frontier, and well within the Arctic Circle. Or how about Belgrade to Bar, on the Montenegrin coast, rumored to be one of the most beautiful of overnight rides? Twenty-six dollars one way, plus seven for a couchette. Beauty comes cheap, and, in the lighter months, it will reveal itself with the dawning of the day.
A suggestion, then, for your compulsory hours of leisure: pick a landmass, get hold of a map, run your finger along the healed scars of the railroad lines, locate the stations, and start to plot. The necklace of lights is out there, somewhere, wrapped in the velvet of the dark. You may never find them; you may miss them entirely, glancing up too late from the window of your train; you may sleep through them, soothed by the loud lullaby of the wheels. But the hunt for the jewels is endless, and priceless, and the night, your co-conspirator, is here to help. ♦
A previous version of this article misstated the station for the Caledonian Sleeper in Glasgow.
