Great Railway Journeys of the World - Changing Trains - 1980

of the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] hello what you're seeing here is the end of europe's golden age of steam railways the old knight ferry has left this platform at london victoria bound for paris and brussels for the last time wasn't much to ride home about all that clanking and shunting on the channel boats made it the most insomniac of sleeping trends and yet it was the very last link were the days when european rail travel was still an adventure britain's last international passenger train a hangover from an age no more than a generation ago when this was the only way to travel for a hundred years excited passengers have been crossing these platforms posh english trippers after the preferred watering hills of montreal bieritz politicians or shady agents on route to the melting pot of the balkans but mainly just people who liked a bit of adventure off to join the eastbound steam hall orient expresses and now i'm traveling east too how far i'll have to go to find traces of those old days i just don't know for much of the journey over the alps i'll be traveling in the best trains that modern europe has to offer but above all this is a journey of the imagination a journey through a world of railways that's already gone [Music] [Applause] try to think of the way it used to be perhaps you've got fond memories of traveling this way in the 40s and 50s when there was all the time in the world and the steam still carried with it a surge of excitement the view from the window was just a b feature before the main attraction [Music] perhaps you'd consider going by one of those aeroplanes that were already forcing such changes on long-distance trains but you decided against it what you wanted was a cruise by railway when the traveling was a holiday in itself [Music] it was worth saving up for and great fun while it lasted perhaps it was never quite so good as memory in the movies would have us believe have you forgotten the noise and the soot do you remember the drafts and delays perhaps not what remains in the mind's eye is the image of a dash across paris and boarding a train to distant places at the gar de leon you still can so what takes our fancy milan or south to marseille the east perhaps through vienna to budapest in the track of istanbul train well certainly a trip to the east will give us more chance of finding steam trains and it'll show us a lot more railways that's why we won't take the direct route we've got a week to travel a week of changing trends stopping where we like and starting with a touch of class [Music] um may not have the romantic look of earlier trends but it has its compensations another worth bearing in mind in future is it always leaves on time [Music] there isn't a better way to start our journey these are the first class continental trends the internationalist dream running across the frontiers of a dozen countries in much the same way that the luxury coaches of the vagon league company did a hundred years before them lucy zelper getting us to our first destination on lake geneva in four and a half hours of quiet air-conditioned comfort [Music] the first thing to do of course is to wear our fellow travelers they're certainly not the elite bunch would have journeyed with a century ago but yes there isn't a middle european king or end of the line archduchess amongst them hardly a spy or an arms dealer just the routine traffic of our more mundane multinational business yet we're in the debt of those early trends the privileged expresses that eventually extended the privilege of travel to the rest of us before them we were bound in by the narrow circles of city or village life until the tracks went over the horizon [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] do so [Music] of course some of the early delights of trend travel are still with us we can still nibble at the pleasures of the rich and famous fast food has a different meaning on trans europe express in the best traditions of bangor lee service the waiters still get by in three or four languages still assume that we recognize the dishes on today's menu as old friends we're still prepared to discuss with a quiet american what's the next best thing to californian claret admittedly you won't get out for much less than 10 pounds ahead but perhaps that's only to be expected in a restaurant with one of the best views in europe [Music] ladies and gentlemen we are arriving at [Music] valor [Music] our first border france into switzerland accomplished with the smoothness of 100 years of practice it's a seven-minute stop just long enough to take the customs and immigration men on board and change engines but that's the flaw in the system these trans-europe expresses born in the 50s we're going to unite europe as never before using the same trains everywhere taking their bookings by computer they've already failed the locomotives may be all electric but there are still four different voltages in use in europe the network controlled by a different country every four years hasn't been able to agree on the type of service to offer or even something as simple as the color of the trains the railways are as national as the business now as they were when the staff of the orient expresses smoothed the unfamiliar business of passport control soon perhaps lucy's alpaca will be as out of place and time as the great european resorts the railways created soon its arrival at lake geneva will be no more than a picture for the scrap books a photograph pasted a few pages on from the holiday snaps of earlier days from the years when this corner of switzerland was little england in the season the well-to-do came to montreal to take the alpine air and have a last fling before the sun set on the golden edge some like kedarimple stayed a lot of people have passed through here they seem to be rather quiet people whether they came here to recollect themselves because it was a beautiful spot and it was quiet and the view is magnificent and you have the lake which is in those days not polluted so it was quiet making you could go for trips on the boat from here people went up to lyon which is very easy with the little trains or to go which they did a lot of course and it was a relaxing place a place packaged by the railway companies bag only was here and hotels to match the excellence of their trends [Music] they used to have the dancing here in what is now the music room and they had a band and we used to have tea and dance in the middle of the room very sedate with our chaperones of course and we had our private parties we had our dances of course we had a special group and we used to go to what's now the hazy land which was called the pavilion despair in those days you could go every afternoon and have tea there and dance and now and then we had a concert there was a lot of dancing in the grand hotel which had a big room for people used to come there i feel it's one of the places you can go and live when you're very old but otherwise i wouldn't come here it's too noisy now [Music] but there are new attractions the commonplace of cadal rimple's day preserved in axel greece in the hills above montreux once the line from bloney to schumby was one of a hundred rural steam railways now it's three miles of track are worked by amateurs the part-time world of preservation society president francois bossar del avi aurelia um the imagination of a new type of visitor i've got a sharpener coming up nice come on charlie boy keep coming this way they're a bit different from the lords and ladies who used to live it up here for one thing they actually want to get close to the machines that frighten the horses so if we go down to the end though we can get her coming back down there tender first she reverses at bloney and we can pick her up against someone near the tunnel mountain an ecstasy of rivets and steam pipes that export manager bill albrecht has captured for a more modern package holiday market we began way back now about 1970 i suppose it would be when really after having been on two or three other people's trips and found that in a lot of instances here they were traveling overnight for most of the time we thought that getting a bit older and a bit wiser this sort of thing we try and put people up in reasonable quality hotels and got a lot of fun out of it you know wine women in song as well as steam train what i'd like to know is if they're going to put the uh rack tank back in order but you know really she's pretty classic in french lines oh very much sir thereby proves me wrong yeah but remember when we were in the states earlier this year we're having a problem with the americans we've been let's face it the americans don't know much about running railroads anyway yeah i've just come back from east germany a fortnight ago and i was in south africa at easter uh last year i managed to visit about 10 different countries actually not all the pursuit of steam trains we went to spain portugal italy um romania can i mention yugoslavia um several places i can't really remember them all i like travel and i also like railways and if you put the two together the one makes a very good excuse for the other you get in the blood you know it's very much steam in the blood i suppose [Music] the first run of europe's newest luxury trend this season you can travel through the scenery of switzerland's golden pass in the comfort of the mountain pullman express at the end of the bloney schomby line in 1931 you could pick up not just any old pullman but the only narrow gauge pullman in the world an electric train just out of its box taking the corners like a hornby model as it wound its way to the smarter ski resorts of the bernese oberland [Music] luxury had even found its way off the beaten track [Music] today it's a two-hour kaleidoscopic trip in the panoramic express tourists the breed that first inspired these railways are still its most important customers [Music] the private narrow gauge montrer oberland bernour railway has made it to living since the turn of the century by bringing trippers around the mountain to schweitzerman at which point all changed to the less panoramic rolling stock of the private but this time standard gauge bern lurchberg's simplon railway it's just across the platform our connection for the hour-long hall to interlaken [Music] this is certainly not the route for people who object to changing trends across switzerland you could take almost 100 journeys and never use the same railway company twice interlaken spoils you with its choice of liveries switzerland's just a giant trade set really where generations of fathers and sons have added more track and extra trains whenever it's taken their fancy with a single-mindedness of men who make railways their hobby the swiss are even prepared to pay for them when they lose money and anyway in a nation suffering from referendum disease of epidemic proportions it's almost impossible to get agreement to close them mind you the private companies don't have the layout entirely to themselves there's even a proper state-owned system our fourth train of the day is on the only narrow gauge line of the swiss federal railways this is the switzerland of the less energetic victorians not the high alps but the fringe of the mountains a view of the snow from the comfort of a travelling rug and a good book and over there meyeringen where sherlock holmes had his nastiest encounter then the climb not relying on legs too steep for ordinary wheels we're on the rack a painfully slow 20 miles an hour as the teeth of the cogwheels under the engine and carriages wind us more than three thousand feet to the top of the brunic pass [Music] an up and over railway with no more than a moment silent running at the summit before we're plunging into the one in ten or one in twelve gradients we drop to the shores of the lake of the four forest cantons and a night in lucerne make the most of it there's a stiffer climb tomorrow [Music] look our third day and one that'll have to start without breakfast able to see this our eighth train being loaded the early morning up goods just about to climb out of its terminus on the other side of the lake this is the milk round the brewery dre and the fruit and veg van all rolled into one for the people who live without a road on riggy mountain it's the school bus too and at the other end of a life the ambulance or the hearse picturesque quaint it may be but the bits now regiban isn't surviving for any reasons of [Music] sentiment it's been getting the mails and the supplies through without a break since the day in 1871 when in the middle of the turmoil of the franco-prussian war it was opened as europe's first mountain railway [Music] [Music] once it was a steam trip all the way steam driven paddles to the wits now pier then behind kneeling black locomotives to the top of the mountain they still dust off engines from the 1920s every summer because the rigi is a special occasions railway as well [Music] for the people of lucerne it's the very place to hold a birthday party to celebrate an engagement or to toast the bride [Music] you certainly need a head for heights when mark twain traveled this way he felt that the one in five gradients and being quite so close to the edge provide a good opportunity for remembering his sins and repenting of [Music] them [Music] [Applause] today it's the japanese who are among the best party customers but mainly it's still the swiss themselves having an ethnic knees up while congratulating themselves for having the mouse to hang onto railways that other less sensible nations may have closed a generation ago [Music] if you haven't been invited to the party you can always conceal yourself with the view from the top what goes up yes of course you guessed comes down by a different railway and a separate company on the other side [Music] the art gold our egypt may be something of a poor relation to other blue trains in the world but because the swiss take everything and particularly railways with the utmost seriousness it still connects at the bottom of the mountain with the federal mainline expresses to zurich [Music] there's always something reassuring about railway stations in the morning the victory of timetable efficiency over human weakness we may not be sufficiently awake to know what day of the week it is but the railway has already been up and about for hours whilst we are still marveling at how these strange europeans can really eat salami and drink schnapps at breakfast our train has already been dressed for the day but i suppose everything should run smoothly here they've had enough practice after all since the very first departure of trans continental railways this has been the turntable of europe when the swiss are being very british and refuse to bring their clocks into line with the rest of their neighbors the ripple runs through the timetables of half a dozen countries whether you're traveling west to east like us or north to south you can scarcely avoid using switzerland as a staging post this station alone handles a thousand trains a day long after the prestige of railways died guards and drivers here are still engaged on work of national importance and they have a uniform to prove it they were experts in courteous passenger handling long before airports began to abuse the privilege and most remarkable of all it seems that wherever you come from they actually understand what you say does this go all the way to vienna i don't have to change anymore thank you enough the departure to the swiss a moment of religious observance it would of course be a sin if the train was late drag three express train transalpine to hit stroke sounds from vienna attention departure the trans lp and the longest part of our journey 10 hours to vienna another border crossing the track of the austrian state railways and the sweep of the tyrol [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] it's simply the best train the urstharishisha bundesbanan has to offer the star of the single main line to the east [Music] so we've settled into the routine the first hours belong to the scenery but then even in the tyrol you begin to feel you've seen that bit before [Music] the train turns in on itself with the polite bow that summons you to lunch and starts to take on the feeling of a not unpleasant 70 mile an hour hotel it's got all the same advantages a captive audience people to overhear anonymity if you want it we know why we're booked in but surely you've often wondered what makes someone want to work here that waiter um or the chef how can he possibly turn out oat cuisine in a broom cupboard [Music] you can understand why the manager does it it's fun being boss in charge of the mobile staff but how do you get the top job on a five-star tread fulfillments [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign fine another nice okay right okay now this is the beauty of our journey with a camera we can stop where the transalpine doesn't we can take a roll of film and join the other british visitors on a railway straight out of the pages of thomas the tank engine the zilitar barnes tank engines are rather more aristocratic names and sadly they don't have a fat controller but they do have derrick mayman who's very kind to them every year he leaves briefcase and business suit at his factory in the midlands and slips into something more comfortable the overalls and oily rags of the foot platform it may be his holiday but it's no less serious a business if one comes to work then one's got to take a proper turn and do somebody's work right through the shift you can't expect people to come on first thing in the morning put everything ready just for you to step onto the foot plate and do the easy stuff so you've really got to take somebody's place and do the whole job otherwise it's not a fair deal this is no part-time railway for the people who live and work along the valley from yenba here on the main line up to the terminus at mayerhofen the zilla is as important as any inter-city express freight is transferred wagons and all from austrian state railways onto its two-foot private track unlike its nationalized neighbor that needs millions of shillings in subsidy every year this line just about breaks even with a little help from its friends if you hate railway museums with all those lifeless frozen exhibits then this is the place to come here they don't worship steam engines it's just good sense to attract thousands of railway collectors every year it makes the balance sheet look healthier they leave it to us to be romantic [Music] [Music] it's an interlude we can recapture in our holiday snaps but we'll have to keep traveling the ziller is a gem but it doesn't have proper steam engines you know big ones on mainline trains can i have some more film please steve perhaps we'll find those where the transalpine is taking us [Music] we settle down for the tail end of our journey woken up by the shunting at rosenheim as we run into germany for a few kilometers snoozing again by the time we get to salzburg charting our position by glimpses of passing stations and the clock in our stomachs we want to point out that there is a restaurant car in this train and we ask you to kindly take advantage of this service the direction to the restaurant car is indicated by an illuminated arrow in the corridor of your coach thank you should we thank the lady who tempts us to the dining car where does she go between announcements will already be back at her proper job announcing on austrian television her calls to dinner and welcoming arrivals are sadly nothing more than cassettes it started out very funny because somebody asked me if i could do the announcement in english french and german for the trans opinion that was it and i thought that was it too but actually it was the beginning of a whole lot of work and now i end up doing all the announcements for the austrian railways and i really enjoyed its completely different work from what i do you know usually i work on television i talk in the radio where there is much more personal engagement in it i mean you don't engage yourself by doing an announcement when a train leaves or arrives i mean you don't show any feelings or you are happy or unhappy i mean actually it doesn't matter you just stick to the text and you do it as it is being asked from you you know via traffic in vienna we will arrive in vienna in a few minutes again [Music] it's everything we expected vienna to be good food and tasteful music a little restaurant up in the woods somewhere except it's the station calf we won't find many railway pie jokes on the vespanhof here the station is more than somewhere to depart from as quickly as possible it's a place to eat and meet by choice rather than necessity [Music] but once you could have looked out from the platforms of the old westbound half and see that this was not a place of happy meetings the trains still came as if life in vienna was running on schedule the nazi orient express brought officials of the high command and the next train to arrive on platform 2 carried the red star of occupation on its smoke box door but whoever came the people still died in the rubble and the old world of pre-war railways died too amid the ruins of the austro-hungarian [Music] empire [Music] the survivors of europe put on a new face there were new appointments to keep but the old prestige expresses would no longer carry people to them they were symbols of an age we wanted to [Music] forget it's only with the distortion of memory that we smile a little and pretend they could have survived mind you bits of those old trains do survive after a fashion there's even the remnant of the orient express a fallen woman of a train now a grubby daily to bucharest that scarcely justifies the honor of being called an express at all once the most capitalist of trends it's now had its name pinched to boost the business on a cheap run to romania the routes that once echoed the first class passenger traffic are now been usurped by freight [Music] this is what brings prestige to the railways now this is where profits grease the sliding away of national frontiers here today hull tomorrow in a roundabout of heavy haulage that leaves lorries standing and notches up one small advance in the battle with the airlines it's the passengers that have been in retreat because people simply aren't as profitable not a patch on containers but if we pause for a moment in a corner of the vienna sudbarnhof we can watch nervous preparation for the arrival of a special passenger train the super express has found a role for itself across these borders of eastern europe this is a train for poor people everyone here knows it as the immigrant train arriving at dawn each day from moscow the compartments of the chopin carry among their passengers the flotsam of political repression little scenes from other people's lives carrying everything they own these are the families and bits of families that count themselves lucky lucky to have got the exit visa which allows them freedom after perhaps years of struggle for these people vienna is the neutral stronghold where the struggle stops for us it's a new start too a journey to the fringe of the world that they've left behind five days out from london we're going to raise a corner of their curtain and slip across the frontier into hungary it can be a nervous moment waiting for the train to leave will it be as sinister as preconceptions and imagination have told us is it significant that the lehar express is our 13th trend we'll know soon enough [Music] there's just an hour of austria left until we arrive at the checkpoint called hegelon i suppose this is what we expected soldiers guns a search of the train while we're invited to change our money where are you going to change money how much do we have to change thank you thank you a change of engines too but at least this one brings a dining car with let it show you it's taken just half an hour to check our passports and visas four times and send us on our way [Music] three hours to budapest tracking the danube across the northern plain of hungary running through a flat landscape that still bears the scars of its history [Music] this is the poor end of the austro-hungarian empire fought over and bartered in a score of european conflicts in the last war leveled in punishment for not knowing what side it was on and always the railways were destroyed because military men at least know how important they are [Applause] [Music] rebuilding has been a slow business because hungary had little help its new masters had long memories and saw the advantages of a generation of poverty but eventually business scents prevailed they didn't have to like the west to trade with them and trade needed trade routes the access to markets that new lines through hungary provided [Music] tourists like us are a bearable inconvenience too we bring hard currency and if it's necessary to woo us with the frivolity of flowers and a glass of wine on the table then so be it will be made welcome unofficially at kalati station our terminus in budapest the rules will be bent a little the hand of state enterprise can't entirely cover the fact that this is a capitalist city a city that just can't be persuaded it's not part of the west [Music] it's not surprising families have shared vienna and budapest ever since the old extravagant days of austro-hungary it'll take more than a new line on the map to break the habit the government has given in austrians no longer need a visa to come here modja alamboshutok the hungarian state railway brings them from the border in their thousands they come to buy food that's cheaper than at home the story goes that the viennese used to come here for their viennese sausage they come now to stay a while with the other half of their family and grumble together about this or that new russian interference in their lives that's another thing they have in common neither the austrians nor the ordinary hungarians count the soviet union among their friends it would be to forget their history if they did but the people of these twin cities that straddle the danube recognize that state control for all the faults of the people who wield it has its advantages and nowhere are they more clearly seen than in the plan for transport buddha and pest can boast a truly integrated transport system on the foundations laid by hungarian private enterprise because after all hungary was in at the start of the age of railways the state has provided cheap efficient travel for the people [Music] railways outgrew the financiers who conceived them they became the great levelers a socialist ideal if we travel a little further six or seven kilometers into the forest above budapest we can find the nursery of that ideal children run the pioneer railway learning to be hungaries real women and railway women of the future it's important in this society too to know how to run the trains on time the people of the new railway so are we too late to catch the generation of steam that we came so far to find almost but their tracks led us to another frontier on a reservation up near the border with czechoslovakia there they were dinosaurs grazing beasts from the mythology of railways still a potent reminder of past endeavors but no mainline train is entrusted to them now they'll shunt freight into a brief twilight and then be allowed to go cold it'll fall to the engine of hungary to damp down the fires of european mainline steam but when they do it'll be with the conflicting sentiments of nostalgia and practicality experienced by men of the same breed in doncaster foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] we traveled a thousand miles to be with them at the end on the way we saw many of the successes and some of the failures of the railways that replaced them we found some countries passionate about railways as never before and we're returning to a country with less resolve we knew this was an image living long after its day but we also knew it was worth seeing it before it faded for the last time [Music] that's [Music] [Applause] [Music] if we travel this way again many more modern parts of the railway networks may have disappeared as well there's already a new generation of european railway design [Music] out of the factories come trends that like intercontinental jets put real speed into travel and take every other scrap of pleasure out perhaps then we'll long for a reminder of the gentles his outfit perhaps we'll wish we had a moment to catch breath at zurich but the landscape was more than just a blur but then it won't be so bad whichever way the trends go we can still use our imagination [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] you

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Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021