Modern travel is ubiquitous. For a startlingly small amount of money, you can fly to a lot of places around Europe with the budget airlines. This does involve having to get to some slightly obscure airports at some unearthly hour of the morning, pass through a moderately humiliating security check before winging your way to the sun. Have the days of glamourous travel final vanished? However, there are still ways of arriving in a foreign city feeling refreshed without having to suffer the cattle class air transport and that is to find the night trains that are still running across Europe.

Andrew Martin decides to see if they are still a viable method of travelling across the continent and to see if the glamour of the past age has rubbed off on the modern transport. Martin catches various trains across Europe; The Blue Train from the Gare de Lyon in the heart of Paris to Nice on the Mediterranean coast, The ‘Orient Express’, a train that is a legend in its own right, though they no longer recommend carrying a pistol. He travels into the twilight zone on The Nordland Railway, one of Europe’s most scenic train journeys. He takes the Berlin Night Express that travels from the Swedish city of Malmö to Berlin before heading back to Paris for The Sud Express and then Paris-Venice.

This is part travelogue and partly a nostalgic look back at the golden age of night express trains that used to flow back and forwards across Europe. It is a more expensive way to travel, but whilst it doesn’t have the prestige of years past with their gilded dining carriages and champagne flowing, going to sleep in one country and waking up in another, definitely makes the travel element a major part of the experience. It is still a relatively safe form of travel that attracts a variety of characters and because it is not always straightforward it makes for interesting reading. It was a way of him reliving some of the holidays that he had as a small child travelling Europe with his father and sister, arranged for by The British Railwaymen’s Touring Club in the early 1970’s. I have read a number of Martin’s books in the past and this is another that he has written that is definitely worth reading. 3.5 stars ( )

I met Andrew Martin by chance a few years ago when I happened to be drinking in one of the very welcoming pubs in Highgate, North London, and was introduced by a mutual acquaintance. I was rather the worse for wear and my contribution to the conversation was simply to tell him, probably more than once, that I had enjoyed his novel ‘Bilton’ and was disappointed that it hadn’t achieved greater commercial success. He was suitably gratified by this genuine assertion, though he politely but firmly indicated that he would prefer to return to reading the book he had brought in with him.

‘Bilton’ is indeed a great novel, and it has had far too little recognition. Martin is, therefore, perhaps best known for his series of crime novels, set on the Victorian railway network and featuring Jim Stringer. Comprehensively researched, they clearly show that he is a man who knows his railways, and that interest comes into its own for this book, a history of the heyday and subsequent decline of Europe’s sleeper trains.

The sleeper first established itself as a viable concept during the late nineteenth century, and most countries in Europe had flourishing networks to support them. During that period, the most prevalent travellers by sleeper trains were affluent Britons or Americans, and that was to continue throughout most of the twentieth century. Sleeper trains have always evoked a certain frisson, not least because of their portrayal in fiction and in films. Agatha Christie set two novels (‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’) and a short story on continental sleepers, and Graham Greene’s commercial breakthrough came with his thriller, ‘Stamboul Train’. These were, however, merely the slightest tip of the iceberg.

Martin’s book looks at the popularity of these fictional versions of the sleeper journey, and compares them to the modern reality. Sadly, the sleeper is an endangered species, with most of the recent services being under imminent threat of termination. To understand why this might be, and how dreadful a loss their cancellation might be, Martin travelled along the routes of the most famous services.

He also touched on Lenin's journey in the 'sealed train' that conveyed him back to Russia following the first wave of the Russian Revolution in 1917. As I had so recently read Catherine Merridale's high;y entertaining account of that journey ['Lenin on the Train'}, i found his summary of it unnecessarily trivial. He might have been wiser to avoid any reference to it at all.

I found this slightly disappointing. While he showed a tendency to slump into Paul Theroux’s relentless moaning and resentment, he lacked Theroux’s capacity for glorious observation. Even at his most deprecating (and he can be exceedingly deprecating when moved) Theroux can always captivate his reader with a pellucid description of his locale. Martin does not have, or at least does not deploy, that facility. As a consequence, while I found the subject matter interesting, and did enjoy the book overall, it was not the unalloyed joy that I had expected. ( )