It’s not the most original observation ever, (in fact it would probably struggle to be in the top ten thousand if there were a book compiling them – which I just might write now I think about it), but there is really no way to travel than by train. You can take your über-cheap no-frills airlines; your fast and spacious air-conditioned coaches; your chav-enabling and shopping mall ferries; even your delightfully-handling hired German sedans, complete with sat nav and leather bucket seats, and you can keep them all for all I care. Because there is only – and always will only be – the train. The tilting, the clacking, the Géricault-scale windows, the restaurant car with linen tablecloths: I defy anyone to ever create a more pleasant way to travel**.
Unsurprisingly, I’m writing from one now. The trip from Cologne to Geneva is a leisurely seven-hour wind through the south German countryside with the cabbage pickers speeding through the window stickers and the terrain changes dramatically as you hit Switzerland. It climbs and undulates and rolls and seems a caricature of how you imagine German Switzerland to be: rural, clean, green, mountainous and heart-meltingly lovely. And it is barrelling past me now and the sun is coming out and I have in my hand a superb of coffee on this fabulously well-appointed train – and what travel fatigue I already have from the drag of carrying my half-ton bag is easing easily away.
Geneva beckons and I have found my second wind for the day. I don’t know if it’s oddly-dressed white people singing at the top of their lungs – but the hills are alive with something here.
**Unless, naturally, you are taking a British train, in which case getting pulled along at 20mph by oxen attached to your pubic hair is an order of magnitude pleasanter. And I suspect too that when they eventually give us the damned rocket packs they’ve been promising since the 50s – train travel may just lose a modicum of its edge.
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