In praise of dreamy multitasking on overnight train travel overnight, services, between, travel, train

tiffiant

In praise of dreamy multitasking on overnight train travel
What's the biggest luxury, the most lusted-after perk of long-distance travel these days? Close your eyes, count to 10 and whisper it gently - sleep.
With the indignities of air travel stacking up by the day, savvy travellers are looking to railway sleeper services for a comfortable alternative.
Though VIA Rail discontinued the sleeper car service between Toronto and Montreal in 2005, it still offers cozy cabins on its Montreal to Halifax, Montreal to Gaspé, Que., and Winnipeg to Churchill, Man., lines as well as the famous "Canadian" service from Toronto to Vancouver.
In the U.K., despite periodic talk of scrapping loss-making sleeper cars, the two overnight train services - the Caledonian from London Euston to Scotland, and the Night Riviera from London Paddington to southwest England - remain popular with late-working MPs, tourists and railway romantics.
The Caledonian trundles north through the industrial heart of northern England, the once-thundering dockyards of Glasgow and alongside moody lochs and forests to Fort William and Ben Nevis, the tallest peak in Britain at 1,343 metres.
But being a contrarian, I took it backwards - from teeming Glasgow Central Station to equally teeming London. It's after 10 p.m. when I arrive at Glasgow Central's cavernous platform, and my train is not yet prepared.
Pre-boarding entertainment is provided by two liquored lads swigging from a purloined pitcher of beer, befuddling a pair of Americans with "weeoch-aye" banter decipherable only to Govan stevedores and the utterly hammered.
When the gate opens for the Caledonian, I scuttle behind the McDrunk Brothers and head for the bar car. Glasgow's Clyde River and grim apartment blocks melt into the night as I savour my complimentary merlot.
Morning comes too soon, and I am awakened with the first edition of the The Scotsman newspaper and a hot bacon roll and coffee. I lift the blinds to reveal a whirl of harassed commuters trooping to the office. I let my day unfurl at leisure, enjoying the hour or so when passengers can linger before vacating their cabins.

tiffiant

Though the Caledonian offers the more dramatic scenery, from London to the lochs, the Night Riviera is equally charming - a rocking cradle from the capital to the independent-minded county of Cornwall at England's rocky southwest tip.

This time, I travel from west to east, bedding down at Truro, Cornwall's principal city, for the night train to London Paddington. This time, mercifully, there are no wasted wastrels to serenade the jaded. Just a smattering of passengers, not all of whom are occupying cabins. There are many more stops on this line, and ghostly figures on platforms drift by through my half-opened blinds like so many tumbleweeds.

The cabins on this train have television screens, but I resist their numbing pleasures. Why ruin the effect of timelessness? The beauty of the sleeper, besides the fun of rooting through the free toiletry pack, is in losing any sense of where and when.

The Europeans have given us the most opulent sleeper services (think the Orient Express), but it is the Americans who introduced the concept, as far back as the 1830s, and who refined and commercialized it by the mid-19th century (George Pullman and Ben Field).

Given the advances in air travel since that time, it is a small wonder that the sleeper car still exists at all. But as pullout beds and even first-class cabins attest, the airlines are eager to steal a page from Pullman's enduring invention.

Gently rocked to sleep on the rails or stealing a few cat-naps between outbreaks of turbulence? I know what I'm dreaming of.

If you go

For more information on overnight rail travel, visit:

- viarail.com (Canada)

- nationalrail.co.uk (U.K.)

- raileurope.co.uk (Europe
http://www.vancouversun.com/trav ... /5796441/story.html

Sleeper-car service is less common these days, but is still offered on some train routes in North America and elsewhere in the world