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Glamorous, exciting, and often nostalgic—when at its best (and let’s be clear, no two journeys are made equal) seeing the world by train can be all of those things and more, especially if you’re on a sleeper train. After all, what could be more exciting than going to sleep in one country and waking up in another? Lale chats with Monisha Rajesh—friend of the podcast and author of books like Around the World in 80 Trains and Epic Train Journeys—about her recent travels by sleeper, and we hear from a listener who took an epic solo train journey across Canada.
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Lale Arikoglu: Hi. I'm Lale Arikoglu and this is Women Who Travel. We love talking about train travel on this podcast. Glamorous, exciting, relaxing, and often nostalgic when at its best and, let's be clear, no two journeys are made equal. Seeing the world by train can be all of those things and more, especially if you're on a sleeper train. After all, what could be more exciting than going to sleep in one country and waking up in another?
Monisha Rajesh: Every single time. It doesn't matter how long it's been in between my travels. I really feel it every time I get onboard and I see something new outta the window or discover something fun about trains that I've never known before.
LA Today's guest is a friend of the podcast, Monisha Rajesh, who spoke to us almost a year ago about train journeys across India. She's written several books, including Around the World in 80 Trains and Epic Train Journeys, and she's currently well into the research for her next book on sleeper trains. She has lots of practical advice about how to make the most of the experience.
Monisha Rajesh: I've just come back from Norway where I did the sleeper train during the midnight sun. It's the [laughs] strangest feeling 'cause your Circadian rhythms are completely thrown out of whack. You're staring out of the window watching the sun not quite go down, but it's sort of orange-y red and then the sky gets these indigo-sort of shards and then it just doesn't ever go dark. And within an hour, the sun starts to sort of take off again from behind the cloud and it just, it's, it's so odd to see. And at 3:00 in the morning you can see people on the edge of the fjords waste deep fishing out of boats and hiking and you see a lot of this from the train window. And again, I have that feeling of, this is why I do this, because I wouldn't see this if I was flying.
This summer I went to Scandinavia and was in Norway and in Sweden and both, and it was right around mid-summer so it was basically light the whole time. And I didn't get a night train, but I did get a very, very, very, very early morning train and I feel like I got to see parts of both of those countries that I just wouldn't have.
LA: Do you ever feel [laughs] like you're constantly missing out on something because you're seeing it flash by you in the window and then it's gone? Do you feel like part of you is saying, “Oh, God, I just wanna get off?”
MR: Oh, definitely [laughs]. I did quite a few times. Um, so the train that I was taking was from Oslo up to Trondheim which is, it's not actually that long a journey. It sets off about 11:00 at night and gets in at about 7:00 in the morning.
The train manager had said, "The scenery becomes absolutely beautiful at about 4:00. I advise you get up and come and sit in the dining car." And so I said, "Okay, fine." And I, I didn't even need to set an alarm because it was so light outside that I was sort of only dozing. And I got up and I went and I had my coffee and, well just felt very odd because it was 4:00 and it should've been pitch black and yet it was, it was night and this very sort of pale, pale blue. And I saw a whole herd of d- I can't remember what they were in Norwegian, but they're similar to antelope. And there were lots of little ones and they were all just bouncing [laughs] around in the field in this really sweet way. And I thought, if I'd been sitting just at the opposite table, I would never have seen them.
LA: Europe is famous for the likes of the Orient Express, that legendary night train associated with Old World glamour and Agatha Christie mysteries. But for Monisha, there's a new generation of sleeper routes to get excited about.
MR: I recently did a trip with a company called European Sleeper which is just a, uh, just put together by two big train fans, one from Brussels and one from, uh, Holland. And they just came together and decided that they wanted to bring back sleepers because of the, I suppose it was towards the end of the '90s that most of the Eur- most of Europe sleeper trains were phased out. And they were really sad that there wasn't a sleeper from Amsterdam anymore. And they managed to, I think they crowd-funded quite a lot of it, um, but they also got investors and, by and large, they managed to put together the, the inaugural train that set off from Brussels and it ran overnight from, I think it was 7:30 p.m., got in at 8:30 in the morning to Berlin. And it's gonna carry on to Prague. That's their, their next destination in mind. And it was just the most magic journey. There were tourists who'd come in from all over the world actually, just to, to ride this train.
LA: At the start of this episode, I called sleeper trains romantic and they are. But what's less understood, according to Monisha, is how kid-friendly they are, on that trip from Brussels to Berlin, for instance.
MR: I talked to a dad with his little boy and he said it's just, it's our time together. He said, "He and I get proper, proper dad and son time and we get," he was only six, I think. But he said he loves getting onboard and he loves climbing up to his bunk and he really likes talking to people in English. They were Dutch and he said, "He absolutely loves meeting people so that he can practice his English." And he said, "We always bump into people who speak different languages and he really likes them being in our compartment." And he said, “I, I love to teach my child that it's safe to trust other people and to develop friendships with strangers and trains are the best way to do that.”
And it, it really stuck with me that he was, he was so keen to impress that on his child to talk to other people and to have conversation with people you don't know and learn their stories because it's, it's the sort of crux of my books. And I found that really lovely that he's trying to sort of instill that in his child from such a young age.
LA: And Monisha took her own daughter, age six, on the Rome to Palermo train.
MR: We did this in Easter and it was a lovely, lovely journey. It's got a really nice kind of da-dum, da-dum, da-dum-when you know that you're, it's done with all the speeding out of Rome and it's just got into the fields. And you really feel that moment where the train's almost telling you, "Right. Now the good bits have gone. You can go to bed." [laughs] Because we would just, sitting, we were kneeling up at the foot of the berth, um, with the, with the blinds up just watching the outskirts of the city go by and my daughter loves that bit 'cause she obviously has a space a small child doesn't really get to see cities, uh, pitch black with all the fun bits and-
LA: Mm-hmm.
MR: ... and she was watching all the lights and she was asking me what everything was. And she said, "Oh, I can see inside people's flats. I can see, oh, you can see the staircase. They've got a library up there and you can see people," you know, pulling books out of their shelves. You could see people cleaning their kitchens before going to bed, you could see the blue light of big TVs, people watching movies. And she was loving all of this. And then suddenly, it all disappeared and went dark and we could see factory lights and I said, the train just seemed to take on this feeling of, right, we're done. There's [laughs] nothing exciting to see anymore till the morning. It's bedtime.
LA: Yeah, it's be- you, you have permission to go to bed. After the break, tips about planning, budgeting and how to get the best deals. And we have a dispatch from a listener about a three-week solo train journey from West to East Canada.
MR: I think the first thing to be very practical and pragmatic is figure out your budget. That's the most important thing because with train travel, you have so many different classes that you could travel in on a sleeper, you could sit upright in a seat all night if you would like. It's not my favorite option because I just, as I mentioned, I'm a very light sleeper and I just don't do well with cricked necks and people wandering around.
Um, you could also have a compartment that's a couchette which is usually between four and six berths, um, shared with anybody. It, I mean, if there are six of you traveling, you can take out the whole thing. Otherwise, you are usually sharing with strangers and some people like that, some people don't. For some people, that's the whole point of train travels. For some people, it's their worst nightmare [laughs]. Um, but you could also travel in a private berth where there are just two and you pay for one berth and you get the whole thing. And you have to pay a supplement for the extra berth, um, but the whole compartment is yours and it's private.
And those prices can vary enormously. You could have your chair ticket for about 40 Euros, for example. And on the same train, same sleeper, you could pay 208 Euros for your private berth. So decide what your budget's going to be and decide where you want to travel because some places have got a great network of sleeper trains and some don't. You might just find a country that only has one main sleeper. Or you could travel in Scandinavia. You could go from Sweden up through Norway and find four or five different sleeper trains. Or in the US, for example. I spent six weeks traveling by sleepers.
So, I would, yes. Budget is definitely the first thing to consider. But also think about practicality of travel, the ability of your passengers to climb up into berths, um, how able are you to do that? I have met many elderly people who have struggled to do that and said, you know, make sure you book your tickets as far in advance as possible so that you have lower berths. Make sure the trains have got disabled access and that they've got accessibility with the sleepers that you're in. Or are you getting on at 11:00 at night, which you might not want to do if you've got kids under six or seven 'cause it can be exhausting [laughs] to try and-
LA: [laughs]
MR: ... drag them on the train when they're fast asleep and get them into a berth. But if your kids are old enough, they might be able to hang around long enough to do that. One of the best things to do is just, it sounds really, really straightforward, but just Google other people's experiences of them in the last three months because they change so often and dining cars get brought on, then they get taken off.
There's a lovely website called Seat 61 put together by someone who used to actually be a train manager, I think, um, at Charing Cross Station in the UK. And he has probably every train in the world listed on there by country, by class. He has people write to him regularly updating him if they find anything that's wrong on their own travels in terms of prices or what the couchettes are like or how easy it is to book things. Um, it's also great to, it, it's also very worthwhile finding out where you can get your tickets because if you're traveling in Eastern Europe, on certain trains, you can't actually buy tickets outside the country and you have to get a local agent who's online to buy them in advance for you and then drop them off at a hotel and you have to give 'em your address about a week or so in advance for them to drop the tickets there for you. So I would say Seat 61 is actually the sort of gold mine of information if you want to start researching routes. And, and the final thing I would say is just always book as far in advance as you can because sleeper trains are becoming really, really popular now and I've actually struggled even three months in advance to get a sleeper berth just for myself, not even for anybody else traveling with me. So, as soon as you know what your dates are going to be, definitely book your tickets with as much notice as possible and be prepared. Be prepared to meet all kinds of people, be prepared for delays. Keep lots of snack and water on you because you never know what kind of cancellations are going to come up.
LA: There's often a real sense of community onboard trains. Rookie travelers can get helpful advice from regulars.
MR: I met somebody in the dining car at about 5:00 AM who we had seen. I was traveling with a photographer at the time and as we were walking through the family carriage which has, it has a built-in play area for children. And I just marveled at it, thinking it's so lovely being in countries where they [laughs] don't hate kids and they actively embrace having children on trains and being around adults. And we'd seen this guy sleeping in [laughs] there. And my photographer laughed, going "There's a guy sleeping in the kids' play carriage, um, across a berth that had a little picture of [laughs] Cinderella above it." And then we found him in the dining car.
LA: [laughs]
MR: He was having coffee. He said, "Oh, I do this journey quite frequently. I absolutely refuse to fly." He said, "I just don't do it." He worked as a search and rescue for the Norwegian Coast Guard and he said, “I just have nothing that makes me want to do that when I could be doing this journey. I love sitting in this dining car. I regularly sleep in the kids' area 'cause they're obviously not in there [laughs] at night.”
So this is an interesting thing about Scandinavian travel. If you buy a sleeper berth, you have to take out the whole thing unless you're traveling with someone you know because they don't sell tickets to two strangers traveling in one berth. But there's a Facebook group that he told me about where you can go on and find out if anyone else is traveling on that train that night. Complete strangers, bear in mind, and you can say, “Are you cool to [laughs] share a two-person compartment?”
LA: Oh my God, you can find your match.
MR: Yeah, you can literally find someone whose happy to do that so you don't have to pay to have the entire thing. You can split the cost and say, “Right, we'll do this together. That's cool.”
LA: Choosing your routes, picking a destination, can be a random decision or it can be carefully planned. Here's a dispatch from listener, Caroline Heller, who traveled 3,000 miles in three weeks getting on and off different trains along the way.
Caroline Heller: I really wanted to see more of my adopted country. And so, I planned a trip on the VIA Rail trains that go all across Canada, uh, in order to mark the event for me of becoming a Canadian citizen. I went through the Rocky Mountains, I went through the prairies, I went through the forests that go on and on and on across Northern Ontario. I was in the cities, like, Toronto and Montreal and I was on the Atlantic Coast.
From Vancouver to Toronto, I booked what they call a berth, which is essentially a bunk bed with a curtain that during the day is a regular seat and before you go to sleep at night, uh, a cabin attendant comes and makes your bed for you and you crawl in behind your curtain. And you have a window so you can watch the landscape go by. A couple of mornings I woke up in the prairies and, um, you just see the green fields and the wild flowers. I had all different kinds of weather from spring flowers to the rain to snow as I crossed the country.
The ocean train from Montreal to Halifax is a little bit different and I had my own compartment so I had a bunk in a compartment with a door that closes and I had my own little shower, too. Whenever I travel, I'm always interested in sampling local food, whatever specialty there is of the different areas, and that was something I tried to do as part of this trip as well. Um, when I got off the train in Winnipeg, I organized a pierogi crawl. Canada's prairie regions have a large Ukrainian diaspora community and, um, pierogis are a specialty.
When I got east to Atlantic Canada, it was all about the seafood. In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and, um, I had one day where I went to a living history village that talks about the history of Acadian settlement in Eastern Canada and the ca- the Acadians are related to the Cajuns in Louisiana in the US. And they had had an event earlier that day and so, one of the guides sent me off with a already cooked lobster that I took [laughs] back to my hotel and then had to figure out how to eat. I ended up borrowing a lobster cracker and some utensils from the hotel kitchen and, um, enjoyed a lo- lobster feast by myself in my hotel room.
When you book any type of sleeper accommodation on the VIA train, uh, your ticket includes three meals a day. And I was actually surprised a- at how elegant, really, the dining car felt because there were white tablecloths and servers brought hot rolls. And, um, there were Canadian wines, as well, both from EC and Ontario, even an Ice wine, if I remember right, one day that we could sample.
I did the trip as a way of becoming just more connected to Canada. When you travel by train, you see how large the country is, you see how diverse the country is. I ended my trip in Halifax at Pier 21 which is essentially Canada's Ellis Island. And I thought, while I didn't come to Canada that way, it felt like, yeah, okay. This is, this is my country now and I'm happy to be here.
LA: I've taken my fair share of sleeper trains over the years and it's safe to say that my quality of sleep has varied dramatically. Coming up, it's almost as though every train and its route has its own distinct quirky personality.
MR: What's interesting is that all sleeper trains have a very, very different rhythm and having been on so many back-to-back over the last, I'd say probably seven or eight months, they are really distinct from one another. The Norway ones are a very quiet humming sound and they don't move from side-to-side, they don't sway, they don't snake around. They're very, very gentle and I slept probably the best I've ever slept on a train on those ones 'cause they just don't move.
Um, sleeper trains in the US as well, Amtrak, my word, you can really feel them. Um, I remember thinking one night, um, I think it was on the Southwest Chief. But it was one of the clangiest trains I've even [laughs] been on.
And I remember falling asleep and just hoping, hoping that I would wake up with my spine intact because it just literally looped and swung back and forth and I remember thinking, it's, this is, this is quite something. I have now got a standard pack with me which is ear plugs, eye mask and I do still keep a little neck pillow, um, even though you do get a little duvet and you get a nice, sort of flat-ish pillow. I still have the things that are comfortable for me at home and without ear plugs, and without the eye [laughs] mask, I do struggle sometimes. 'Cause I am actually a very, very light sleeper.
And as soon as I get in and I know I'm about to go to sleep, I go a sort of de-rattling of the compartment and I take down all the coat hangers, I take any bottles of water or anything that could clink or roll, and lay it flat in my bag between clothes. I always make sure all the blinds are fully down, no, anything that could drip, any [laughs] towels or anything like that, and make sure that it's sort of foolproof. I turn down the volume on the announcements, uh, speaker 'cause you will invariably get some horrendous announcement at 6:00 saying we're coming in in an hour and I don't need that. But otherwise, it, it can be hard. It can be hard to sleep if it's a particularly rattle-y route.
With a lot of sleeper trains, they come in at around 6:00 in the morning or 7:00 in the morning and if you haven't had a brilliant night's sleep, there's nothing that you want to do more than go to a hotel and lie down and sleep. And you can't check in to most places till about 3:00 in the afternoon. And that has, as talking very honestly, been a problem for me a little bit because I've just got to kill time. You just have to go and find a café.
I generally don't sleep [laughs] really [inaudible 00:20:49] because I always want to get up probably about 6:30, having a coffee standing in the window with a cyclist. There are lots and lots of cyclists onboard sleeper trains 'cause they're some of the only trains where you're allowed to bring bikes, um, and also dogs. You have loads and loads of dogs [laughs] on sleeper trains, as well. In Sweden, the Swedish trains, they have, um, a dog carriage which is one of the best places I've ever been.
And they're all sitting around together under the [laughs] seats and when you get to lon-
LA: Oh, my God. I love that so much.
MR: ... it's so great. When I was there, I was in Finland over December, very close to Christmas. And the dog carriage had probably about seven or eight different dogs. A couple got car sick which is why the owners had to take them on trains back home for Christmas. And the best bit was at long stops, you would see all the dog owners getting down on a snowy platform and just urging these dogs [laughs] to just get on with it and just do your thing before we get back on. It was so funny to watch. And they were all [laughs] trying to make friends on the platform.
LA: As for the best place to make friends and maybe get a little drunk, the dining car.
MR: I think, for me, the dining car is the hub of what makes a sleeper train and the only negative that I have, I think, from what I've seen over the last six or seven months is that, so few sleeper trains have got dining cars now. And I've learned that it's because, to have a dining car, you need an extra engine to actually power the dining car and the restaurant and some of the national train services just can't actually afford it and the budget just isn't there. So that's why a lot of the Eastern European ones, and actually some of the Western European ones, don't have dining cars.
And that's really sad for me when I get onboard and find there isn't one because that's, for me, it's always like a beating heart of a sleeper train. Because once you've dumped your bags and you've figured out where your compartment is, everyone winds their way towards that dining car and they have a look at the menu and then they sit around. And then that's where you get chatting to people. And that's where you make friends and you have people who even spend the entire night in there just chatting and drinking with people and then go back to bed just to get their [laughs] bags.
LA: Oh, I had a very drunken experience-
MR: [laughs]
LA: ... in the dining car, um, on the way up to Inverness-
MR: Oh, I can well imagine that.
LA: ... a couple a days before Christmas-
MR: [laughs]
LA: ... um, with my parents. And we, like, cracked open a couple of bottles of wine and we got very drunk, um, on this train and then stumbled into our compartment.
MR: Very easily done.
LA: It was wonderful. It was so much fun.
MR: Was that the Caledonian Sleeper?
LA: It was the Caledonian Sleeper.
MR: Oh. I love it.
LA: And we got talking to all the other people and, you know, it was Christmas so that everyone had sort of bags of presents and people were passing around whiskey. It felt very festive.
MR: That's so nice.
LA: It was really wonderful. All of this sounds pretty fantastic so I had to ask Monisha, when has the cold reality of a long sleeper journey put a pin in that sense of magic and nostalgia?
MR: I have had a massive, massive delay, um, when I was traveling from Ankara to Kars. I was on a sleeper train from Ankara to Kars and we were delayed by about 30 hours.
LA: Oh, God.
MR: So the engine had broken down and it was snowing and it was the day of the earthquakes and all around, it was possibly one of the most horrendous experiences [laughs] of my life because we had actually been in both the earthquakes. In Ankara, we'd, we'd felt very much where we were. And we were on the sleeper train that night from Ankara to Kars and obviously the whole country was in absolute turmoil with what had happened.
And the trains were perfectly safe where we were going so we hopped on and I think, you could, you could really feel the difference in atmosphere onboard amongst everybody there in a way that I'd never felt on a train before. That sense of community was stronger than ever before and we were all sitting in the dining car. People were trying to contact family. I felt really, really empathetic in a way that I just don't think I would have had I not witnessed people actually traveling around, trying to get in touch with people, and just hearing what they were saying about the reason it had happened and what was going on.
And then when the engine broke down, I remember the dining car attendant saying to us, "This is," he's like, "This is all just like one big kind of omen of things." But they, a- all the bad things will go at once and then everything will be fine. And the heating [laughs] went off 'cause there was no engine. But it was, it was a strange feeling because all these things were happening. It wa- it, it had broken down, there's no heating, it was snowing outside, we have no food, they did a mass order of kabobs for about 60 people and these lovely guys appeared at the train station and brought them onboard. And I remember thinking, any other time in my life I would be so irritated and so annoyed and grumbling away about this breakdown. It was not at all the journey that it, it should've been but, I remember still coming away thinking, at least I'm able to come away from this and I'm okay.
LA: Above all, perhaps Monisha's advice is, no matter how difficult it might be, pluck up courage to get to know fellow passengers so that they are no longer strangers.
MR: There's just this sense of wanting to break ice with people very quickly because also you know that you're going to be with each other for a long time and have to constantly move around each other. You're sleeping above and next to strangers and you do need to establish some kind of friendship. All the trains that I've been taking over the last year, all the sleepers I've been on have been people who have some sense of nostalgia for train travel. And they're people of all ages as well. I've met people in their 80s who are just really enjoying being able to take time to travel from one place to the next. They find it easy physically to actually take trains rather than standing around at airports, going through security, having to, you know, be on your feet so much before you actually get on your flight. And with trains, you just don't have that. You just get onboard and you can go and find your seat immediately and there's no hassle in the same way, I think, that you, you definitely have when you're flying anywhere.
LA: It's really interesting what you're saying about that kind of sense of, there's almost like a sense of community on a train.
MR: Yeah.
LA: And when you're flying, everyone hates each other-
MR: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
LA: ... and everyone is trying to escape each other and you're cramped in this tiny tin tube. And when you're on a train, it's kind of the opposite. It's pulling something else out in people and it feels like travel. It feels like traveling in a way that, when you're on a plane and moving through airports, it, it doesn't.
Well, this was fantastic. I'm so glad that you could come back on. Um…
MR: Oh, thanks for having me back on.
LA: Next week, we're mixing things up a bit and teaming up with our friends over at Bon Appétit again. I'll be appearing in an episode of Dinner SOS where Chris Morocco and Shilpa Uskokovic try to solve a dinner party quandary for me, and we're sharing it here. See you then.
I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @LaleHannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus and Gabe Quiroga. The show is mixed is Amar Lal. Jude Kampfner from Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. See you next week.