I got the idea after seeing Great Western Railway carriage number 9038 — one of the oldest surviving sleeper cars in Britain.
The carriage entered service in 1897: it would have seen countless daybreaks over Paddington’s lattice roof, sped beneath every phase of the Bristol Channel moon. Its mahogany compartments would have hosted the dreams of fin de siècle travellers: and nightmares too during the years of war, pandemic and financial ruin that followed. It was retired in 1931, and then became part of a bungalow — the wheels removed, tiles stuck on the roof. The old posters of seaside resorts were left inside for the homeowner to admire as he sipped his morning tea.
In the 1980s the carriage was prized off the bungalow once more and restored to its original condition at the West Somerset Railway, a heritage line run by enthusiasts. I happened upon it at the railway’s Gauge Museum, in a converted goods shed at Bishops Lydeard station. It was, I think, the most beautiful thing I have seen on iron wheels.
Stepping inside all was shadow and sepulchral silence. The wood panelling seemed as if it belonged to some lost Tudor manor, dusky from decades of polish. There were steel washbowls, and antimacassars on seats embossed with “GWR”. The carriage roof was “clerestory” in design — a term borrowed from church architecture — crested with a strip of glass so that passengers could lie in bed and see the stars and rising steam above. Present-day visitors spoke in hushed tones in the corridor — as though they might disturb some lingering Victorian passenger. But only mannequins are resident in the compartments these days.
Consciously or not, those whispering visitors felt a reverence for that carriage — understood that it was a near-sacred thing. In the 21st century, high-speed trains can move faster than the take-off speed of a jet airliner: in Japan, maglev trains levitate above the track. The Beijing-Shanghai railway traverses a bridge more than 100 miles long, and the Gotthard Base Tunnel sees trains plunge 2,500 metres under the ice-bound Alps.
Great train journeys
This is the latest in a series on long-distance rail travel.
You can find previous journeys, including Amtrak’s Chicago-Miami sleeper and the slow train across Tanzania, here
But in the 200 years since the first passenger train departed, no invention has quite surpassed the intimacy or grace of a sleeper car: a space with running water, a window, a bed. A tiny, temporary home in which a passenger can be unconsciously translated from one location to another — borne sleeping across the land, as trustingly as an infant in its pushchair. The museum staff said they are often asked — do things like this still exist?
And so, two weeks later, inspired by GWR 9038, I find myself at London’s Paddington station, boarding a westbound sleeper for Penzance, which, like its ancestor, is done out in GWR livery. The name of this sleeper is the Night Riviera: two words which in their companionship still seem to have some residual glamour and poetry. I wanted to know if the modern train did too.
For a century, sleeper trains were an integral part of Britain’s railways. As late as the 1980s you could catch an overnight train from Bristol to Glasgow, from King’s Cross to Newcastle, and from Paris to Victoria (with an interlude on a ferry). Hundreds of passengers slumbered their way up and down the land in a nightly somnambulant waltz, on services marketed by British Rail with the irresistible slogan “Close your eyes and you’re almost there.” The gradual death of the network came with the advent of faster daytime trains and budget airlines, as well as diminishing patience with rolling stock that was costly to run and useless in daylight hours.
In recent times, ultra-luxe sleepers have, paradoxically, become much in vogue. This year Belmond will launch its “Britannic Explorer” train in the UK, with three-night itineraries starting from £6,300 per head (based on two sharing a cabin). Britain’s only other night train, the Caledonian Sleeper, which runs between London and various destinations in Scotland, also leans towards the luxury market following a 2019 reboot: you can easily pay £400 per person for a return trip to the Highlands in an en suite cabin for two, or more than £500 per head for a cabin with a double bed.
But arguably the last true upholder of the sleeper tradition is the Night Riviera. Two utilitarian trains shuttle nightly between Paddington and Penzance, one moving up, the other down like its counterweight, passing each other in the Somerset Levels in the small hours. I paid a £69 supplement for a private compartment, on top of a one-way fare of £75. The train departs London a few minutes before midnight, the last passengers disembark just before eight. There is no gourmet dining, no en-suite bathroom, no fanfare. It is a means to get from A to B, but — for those who notice — a journey into railway history too.
I find my Night Riviera train on Platform 1, the grandest in Paddington. Watching over the racing green carriages are the oriel windows of the old Great Western Railway boardroom, from which top-hatted railwaymen would have regarded engines through soot-smeared panes. I head for the first-class lounge in which sleeper passengers are waiting. It is, like much of the British railway experience, a mix of the scruffy and the sublime.
Half of the lounge is busy: people queue for complimentary orange juice in plastic cups, a laminated sign apologises for a broken dishwasher. The other, quieter, half of the lounge was Queen Victoria’s waiting room. Here, hidden down a corridor, bas-relief goddesses adorn the fireplaces, and a chandelier hangs from a domed ceiling. Behind a worn Chesterfield is a preserved patch of the gilding that would have been known to the old queen, before the waiting room was whitewashed for public use.
Victoria was the railway queen: the first British monarch to board a train when she departed Slough for Paddington in 1842. Her final journey was the funeral train from Paddington to her Windsor tomb: the locomotive headlamp draped in a purple veil, as though the machine itself were in mourning.
Night Riviera passengers are summoned to compartments that are compact but comfortable, with a sink, a small wardrobe and a carpet with diamond pattern. My on-board host Jon makes a cordial introduction, takes my breakfast order of porridge and explains that I’ll need to vacate the train before eight.
“Unless you want to end up in the depot!” Then he looks more closely, suspecting a trainspotter in his midst. “Maybe, you do want to end up in the depot.”
We nudge forward: the train limbering from its rest, just as passengers aboard it settle down to slumber. Lying on the beds, you feel, quite viscerally, its mechanical movements under your spine: the creak and play of joints, the hiss of pipes, the grumble of a diesel locomotive five carriages ahead. Such sounds and jolts will trespass in the dreams of passengers over the coming hours. For a while I stay awake.
Street lamps flash by. Views are offered then snatched away. Foxes rummaging in bins. Security guards on patrol. The depot where sleek new Hitachi express trains are stabled. By comparison, the Night Riviera is a dinosaur: its carriages date from the early 1980s. It is tonight hauled by locomotive 57602 — parts of which date to the 1960s. And it travels at an average speed that would have been agreeable to Queen Victoria — who insisted her royal train never exceed 40mph.
“The Night Riviera is an individual train,” explains Mark Smith, a train expert also known by the name of his website, The Man in Seat 61. “There’s nothing else like it. It’s like checking into your favourite Cornish B&B in central London — it has an atmosphere, and I love it.”
The company that operates the Night Riviera, FirstGroup, resurrected the “Great Western Railway” brand in 2015. But the original incarnation of the GWR, extant from 1833-1947, is perhaps the most eulogised of railway companies. Where its peers — such as the London North Eastern Railway (LNER) and the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) — were all about modernist design and beating speed records, the GWR was more renowned for its sense of tradition. It named its engines after castles and kings, manors and halls: its stations were adorned with heraldry. Bristol Temple Meads was designed to resemble a gothic palace.
But most of all, the GWR was central to the creation of the seaside holiday, transporting the masses from industrial cities to Devon combes and Cornish coves. The GWR billed itself as “the Nation’s Holiday Line” — its chocolate-and-cream-hued carriages offered a magical means of escape for millions.
“We forget that only a generation or two ago, getting on a train to the West Country was something everyone did,” says Smith. “The GWR took you there. It was ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’, the one where everyone wanted to work.”
It was also the railway every artist wanted to paint. I am asleep when the Night Riviera clatters over the stygian Thames on Maidenhead Bridge, the setting for JMW Turner’s “Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway” (1844). Turner’s masterpiece was unveiled just three years after Brunel’s rails first connected London and Bristol: the brushstrokes evoke the noise, heat and displaced air of a radical new technology.
William Powell Frith, meanwhile, chronicled the GWR’s seismic social effect. His painting “The Railway Station” (1862) shows Paddington platforms busy with gentry, commoners, policemen and thieves — people who might previously have barely left their own parish roamed and mingled in a new era of mobility.
By the 20th century, the GWR was producing its own posters. The most original, “See Your Own Country First” (1907), juxtaposed a map of the Cornish promontory with the Italian peninsula, with the questionable claim that “There is a great similarity between Cornwall and Italy, both in shape, climate & natural beauties.” The maps were framed with lemons to reinforce the point.
But it is deep in the small hours when we pass the scene of my favourite GWR painting. After a trip to the loo I peek under the curtain, and watch reflected moonlight run like mercury on the iron rails. Still half-dreaming, I spy a white horse suspended above a reef of low cloud. In the last years of his short life, Eric Ravilious came to the edge of Salisbury Plain to work on two paintings: “Westbury Horse” (1939) and “Train Landscape” (1940). The first shows the famous white horse resplendent on a hillside, a plume of steam rising from a faraway train. The second shows the reverse perspective, the horse seen from within a third-class GWR carriage — a view like my own. It was a relationship that preoccupied the artist: the modern encountering the mystical.
The Westbury White Horse can be dated no earlier than the 17th century. Yet it belongs to a tradition of white horses strung across Wessex’s chalk downlands with its origins in prehistory, the first perhaps carved in the Bronze Age to mark the coming of the horse to Britain as a new means of mobility. One interpretation of Ravilious’s Westbury paintings is the ancient steed as adversary to a modern train. But as I looked up at the horse, silvered by a half moon, the two entities seemed more like companions: wayfarers passing in an immense and lonely night, then hurrying on.
We trundle on to Exeter, with its two stations named for saints. The eastern sky begins to grey as the train commences its famous run along the Devon coast. It is a ride I have done countless times — as familiar as a favourite film — but like rewatching a movie, I can affect amnesia of what is to come and, through tired eyes, enjoy it anew. We skirt the breaking waves at Dawlish. Our train charges at a sandstone sea cliff, before a tunnel appears at the last moment: the red rock withdrawn like a matador’s cape. Out in the distance are the lights of Channel shipping. I wonder if the captains look to land, see the streak of the sleeper and recognise this nocturnal wanderer as one of their own.
Sky and sea are rouged with dawn as we pass Royal Navy warships on the Tamar. More stations follow — Saltash, Liskeard, Lostwithiel — sounding almost liturgical whenever recited by a conductor, though all but the snorers are silent on the sleeper.
Beyond Exeter, a single line traverses the long peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. Seen on a railway map it almost resembles a river system: the mainline fed by the tributaries of its branch lines — from Newquay, Falmouth and St Ives — along with dried-up watercourses: those tracks ripped up as a result of the Beeching cuts of the 1960s but whose routes can still be traced. And, just like a river, the railway narrows the closer you get to its headwaters. By the time the Night Riviera passes St Michael’s Mount we are on a single track.
At Penzance, passengers who fell asleep amid the London tarmac awake to the rustle of palm fronds, the cry of seabirds, the horn-blast of the Scilly ferry. England is a small country, but here, at its western edge, it is just about worthy of a sleeper train. How long this service will survive in the age of HS2 is anyone’s guess. But the Night Riviera possesses a magic undiminished since GWR 9038 was first robbed of its wheels: that passengers might rub their eyes, and find themselves transported.
200 years of the passenger train
This year the UK celebrates “Railway 200” — the bicentenary of the birth of the modern railway, generally considered to be the departure of the first steam-powered train on a public railway, the Stockton and Darlington Railway in north-east England. On September 27 1825, Locomotion No 1 left Shildon on a 26-mile trip to Stockton, pulling as many as 31 wagons and carrying between 450 and 600 people. Its average speed was barely faster than walking pace (and injuring a brakesman’s foot in the process), but it was deemed a great success and its arrival marked with a 21-gun salute and a banquet at the town hall.
County Durham is at the heart of this year’s celebrations — with a regional festival ongoing until November, centred on the National Railway Museum’s excellent and recently expanded Locomotion campus in Shildon, and the rebooted Hopetown museum in Darlington. Both are free to visit — see sdr200.co.uk.
There’s also a roving three-carriage exhibition train named Inspiration, which considers two centuries of railway history more widely. It’s pulling into mainline stations and heritage railways across the country from June — interactive exhibits are seemingly pitched squarely at younger visitors during the school holidays. It’s also free but you’ll need to book in advance to visit (see railway200.co.uk). The Railway 200 website also has useful information on local railway societies, model railway clubs and heritage railways running their own commemorative events during the anniversary year.
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