Two carriage attendants stand outside scanning the approaching travellers. Most passengers with reservations in the Croatian carriages have rucksacks and wear espadrilles. I’m the only person here without a visible tattoo. I wonder where they are going, perhaps to crew on smart yachts in the Adriatic or to play bongos and breathe fire at late summer music festivals. I seem to be the only long-range rail adventurer here.

Bob (I shall call him ‘Bob’ as I didn’t discover his real name) at first says I’m in compartment eight, then changes his mind to three, then eventually shows me to number six. Inside is a clean and well laid out home for the night, set up for me as the sole occupant – there are two further berths, the top one is incredibly high up. My dreams come true and there is both air conditioning and a fully functional opening window. But I’m roasting and sweaty from manoeuvring all my bags, so I dump them and join the guards back out on the platform to enjoy some cool late evening air.

We eventually set off on time at 11.35, and the carriage feels incredibly smooth. Stealing as many pillows as a dare from spare berths I retire for the night. Before I settle in Bob reminds me twice to lock my door and tells me that we have a border inspection at around 08.00am, so there is time for a reasonable sleep once I have rigged an improvised cover out of duct tape for the night light that seems bright enough to illuminate a small town.

I wake early to the sound of silence. We are sat in a station in Slovenia surrounded by goods wagons. There has been much shunting in the night, and can I remember most of this as the lights and air conditioning switch off each time the engine is uncoupled from the train. Outside there is weird weather. Low clouds drop from the mountains and blanket the valley tops. The sun is blocked from view until it slowly burns through the early morning haze.

The crossing into Croatia is uneventful and Bob serves me a cup of coffee and a long-life croissant in my compartment before we arrive in Zagreb at just after 08.30.

This has been a very comfortable run, only slightly spoiled by feeling a need to wake early in case the train reaches the border whilst you are still in bed. Speaking of beds, this one has been wide compared to other European sleepers and very comfortable. I wouldn’t like to be in the top berth though, unless ropes are provided along with a complimentary course in belay climbing. The only other slight negative has been the two tiny toilets, both of which have been without water and one without electricity.

My carriage is number 263, in the middle of the train. It is a distinctive and rare looking Hungarian sleeper, painted light blue. At one end a steward called Oscar greets genuine passengers and stops drunk German’s looking for the last train to Stuttgart from getting onto his carriage. His face says he is used to this. He studies my paperwork and ushers me aboard. I’m in berth 11, which happens to be the very first one in the carriage. That’s bad news for me as it will be a bumpy night over the wheels, but at least the toilets are at the other end. The carriage next door is locked off to prevent any InterRailers heading to Croatia sneaking in. I have booked a single berth compartment, which in effect is just blocking off a three berth one and using it for single occupancy. As I booked it at the last minute I have had to pay an exorbitant “full” fare (£170), but all my other plans work around this train so I have taken the hit. By comparison, on the Romanian leg later in the week, the same set up and nearly twice the distance, cost me £80.

On the plus side the sheets are clean and the air conditioning works. It’s slightly grubby, but not really dirty. The bin contains a few cigarette butts. So much for non smoking. I lay my things out and settle in.  We set off on time, and it’s immediately clear I should have taken some sea sickness pills. The carriage bounces along, swaying from side to side as we accelerate. There isn’t much to do, and it’s been a long day so my plan is to sleep for as long as possible.

Oscar comes to see each passenger to explain how the lights and the door locks work. There are three locks on the inside of my door, and I’m not sure why we need to be locked down like Fort Knox tonight. With that done he wishes me goodnight, but before he leaves I ask him for a spare pillow. He stares at me blankly, so I show him my single pillow and hold up two fingers. “One bed, one pillow” he says. “But I have paid for three beds..” I remind him. He ignores this and retreats down the corridor. I thank him for his help and go digging in my bag for the secret key. If you have followed my adventures before you will know that I can open pretty much any door or compartment on most trains. All I need to do here is unlock and pull down an unused berth and then get a pillow myself. I hope you don’t think this makes me a bad person. With this secretive pillow hijack completed, Oscar then surprises me by returning with the fabled second pillow. I don’t think he notices what I have done, which is just as well. This has happened to me before, and my guess is that he had not realised I had bought a single compartment, maybe he was thinking I was just a lucky lone passenger in a triple. After this incident he seemed much more helpful..
As directed, I locked up my door, and turned in straight away. It was a good plan but after about half an hour I had to rethink a few things. The problem was that the train was constantly speeding up then braking. Braking much harder than I had ever experienced on a train – this was the deceleration of a jet aircraft landing on a short run way. Surely trains would have seat belts if this were envisaged? I was okay as my berth was across the direction of travel, but everything else in the compartment was hitting me or something else as the driver braked. Even my bag was landing on my bed. I put the light back on and decided to just lay everything flat on the floor so nothing could fly away. With this done I wedged myself into the narrow bed and tried to drift off.

The train had other ideas. Over the next six hours I was put through some fairly intensive Hungarian train passenger crash test dummy testing. Every time we stopped the steward dropped the steps to pick up non existent passengers. This made a noise like a small family car being dropped upside down onto concrete from about 10 feet. The alarm kept on going off – I didn’t know what this meant, so like everyone else I ignored it. The train decoupled and recouped five times (that I counted) – with the unsurprising banging and crashing that usually accompanies such a procedure. Several times we must have switched engines as the power went off. In the compartment this was signalled by loss of lighting and air conditioning. The quality of my sleep was thus probably on par with a foot soldier on night sentry duty in the Vietnam (American) war. I only got few short bursts of fatigued sleep, but I made the best of it.

For some reason I had imagined there would be border formalities during the journey, but of course I was wrong – this journey was all inside the EU and the Schengen rules were in play. We spent much of the night in Austria, and after leaving Vienna at 06.00 we then crossed into Hungary at about 07.30. I lay on my bed dressed and ready for action but dozing occasionally until Oscar served me a breakfast tray at about 08.00. This consisted of a risky chicken sandwich, a croissant in a sealed bag that was guaranteed to be fresh for several years, and instant coffee. I passed on the food, but needed the caffeine badly. We pulled into Budapest Keleti station at 09.24. As The Four Seasons would say, “Oh what a night”..

Oscar, still in nice first class mode, helped be get my bag onto the platform and wished me a good day. The sun was shining, and the station felt different to those of the day before – less ordered and full of people selling random things. This included lots of books. I contemplated picking up a cheap copy of “The Greatest Chess Moments of the Twentieth Century” before deciding I needed to find a shower as a priority. Shopping for exotic paperbacks could come later. Doing my best to avoid a classic train station taxi scam, I still managed to fall for a mild version of the train station taxi scam, but it was just a non metered slightly inflated price in Euros, nothing to feel too bad about.

Time to explore Budapest, which was looking amazing in the late September sunshine.

Like a puzzle from the “Crystal Maze” television show, the door to the lounge does not open. At first I think it’s a door controlled by a sensor, so I move about, gently at first, and eventually even throwing some shapes. The door stays firmly closed. I look around feeling foolish, but there is no obvious sign of how to get in. The soldiers stare but offer no guidance. In the end I have to wait for a regular who shows me the secret button, hidden on a pole behind a bush. Very cunning.

I have an hour or so to wait for the 9577 TGV to Munich. Munich doesn’t really feature much as a connecting stop in the original timetable of the Orient Express, as Vienna was the major rail junction. Here trains headed for either Bucharest or Istanbul. Today Munich is a better staging post for me going east, as it gives me access to a connecting sleeper train tonight headed for Budapest. There are several trains headed from Paris to Munich, mainly German ICE trains, but once a day there is also a TGV operated jointly by DB and SNCF.

The “duplex” or “double-decker” trains are huge, and the silver locomotives look very impressive. Just in case you might not be aware, the “Double Deckers” was a slightly cult and influential British children’s television show in the 1970’s. There is a catchy theme tune too, but I shall spare you from that here. My service today is the latest (third generation) version of this TGV type, known as the EuroDuplex. It’s a cool train, and I don’t care if you think I’m a trainspotter for saying so.

I head for carriage 11, seat 93 – it’s a top deck seat in first class. I had booked a seat facing the direction of travel, and seat 93 isn’t. The reason for this as I later discover is that the train changes direction in Stuttgart. Right on time at 15.55 we cruise out of Paris, and once out of the suburbs we quickly break the 300 km/h barrier. It feels effortless and the ride is incredibly smooth. This is a journey to savour as the seats are very comfy and I’m pretty tired. I fall asleep almost immediately and wake up in Strasbourg, 1 hour and 40 minutes later.
The staff on the train are great. They all speak German, French and some English. In the end I give up with my French, as I don’t want to accidentally address a German in French, so I just stick to English. It seems best all round. A friendly chap with a cap at a jaunty angle and a pierced ear takes regular orders for food and drink. I’m just not feeling well enough to eat, but I manage to drink lots of water.
After a relaxing afternoon passing through some great scenery, the train glides into Munich at 21.30, the end of the line for this service. Munich is not a particularly modern or beautiful station, but it has a huge number of platforms. This leg has been easy, comfortable and shows off all that is good about European high-speed rail.

My plan here is to hold my own mini Oktoberfest in the two hours I have before my next train. One of the helpful DB staff confirms that I need to be on platform 14 at 23.35 for Budapest. As I head for a beer keller I have to do a bit of a double take in the station concourse. Nearly everyone is dressed in lederhosen or traditional costume. The men look slightly comical and the women look just lovely. Oktoberfest is a big deal locally as well as internationally, and I feel quite underdressed. I hope to return to Munich later this trip, as the prices for rooms are incredibly high in September. Tonight I’m going to keep heading east.

The rum news was that the carriage next to mine – 271 – was missing. I say this not because I felt sorry for passengers hoping to get a seat on board carriage 271, but because it’s main purpose was to serve me my breakfast. They had forgotten to add the restaurant carriage. I had really been looking forward to this meal, as PKP chefs make a wicked ham and scrambled egg dish coupled with having excellent barista skills. Perhaps even worse was that I had no emergency rations (or even water) in my bag. It would be a day of fasting. The journey takes about 5 hours, so not the end of the world, but a useful lesson to me not to take it for granted where the next meal is coming from.

We chugged out of Hbf about 5 minutes late and navigated slowly through the maze of tracks east of Berlin. I actually managed to get some sleep for an hour or so, until we arrived at Frankfurt (Oder) – the Polish border. I continued to snooze, but after half an hour I noticed we had not yet moved. Out on the platform a few people were smoking and not looking like they were going anywhere in a hurry so I got out to investigate. I found a conductor (actually a conductress) who spoke some English, and the news wasn’t good. The train was due a crew change, but the crew had not turned up. We could be here for some time. I thought about this for a while, and decided to break the cardinal rule of long distance rail travel – never leave a train out of sight with your luggage still on board..

My plan was to take advantage of the delayed train and run a local foraging expedition to make up for the lack of scrambled eggs on board. Knowing I was about to undertake a high risk mission I explained my predicament to the conductor. She thought about it, and seemed to take quite a while considering how long she thought we might be here for without being very conclusive. I finished up by saying “You promise you won’t leave without me?” She smiled, looked at me with kind but I thought quite professional eyes, and said “For sure”.

So with a sense of schoolboy excitement that I was breaking my own rules, I found a cafe at the far end of the station and scored some fresh coffee and rations to last the day. In hindsight I need not have hurried, but it’s human nature not to want to be stranded – these are after all exactly the sort of railway events that I sometimes have nightmares about!

We got on the move again after a couple of hours. I could have actually enjoyed a full course lunch had I known. The new crew is Polish, and a bit like my crossing from Holland the other day, it would seem the crews to stick to their native country on the train, not crossing the border. The new conductorski spent quite a long time explaining or apologising on the PA system for why we were so late and hungry. I could not really understand a word, as we have now moved from announcements in three languages, to just in Polish.

The seriousness of the situation became clear a few minutes later when a nice Polish girl appeared with some PKP emergency supplies. Prince Polo wafer biscuits are standard first class fare, but this time a chocolate almond and a raisin cookie. Things must be really bad!

As the light faded we crossed the increasingly misty and frozen Polish countryside. I think I’m pretty much crossing the line of permanent snow now until I head south again in China. It’s not that cold here, but just enough to keep snow on the ground.

I’m hoping to arrive in Warsaw Centralina just an hour and half late this evening. It’s not been the perfect day on the rails, but it’s good to have a few things not quite work out. I feel this tests my confidence and resolve to stay positive in the event of a more serious problem.

As I write this blog I’m sitting in the Hopfingerbrau bar inside the station enjoying a Berliner beer and a pretzel. Looking out at people going about their business i can’t see anyone looking stressed or I’ll temperered. The design of the station seems to be having a genuine effect on the mood of the passengers and the quality of their experience.

I have enjoyed a short break here in Berlin. It’s my first proper visit in 30 years, and of course much has changed. My memories of the inter rail summer trip of 1986 are somewhat hazy, but I definitely remember taking a train through East Germany and the “Berlin corridor” – then spending a couple of days in West Berlin. My trip also included a day trip to East Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie. Call me paranoid, but I am sure that we were tailed for a few hours as we blew our compulsorily exchanged East German Marks on lunch and some schnapps glasses in a rather quaint but empty department store.

Today Checkpoint Charlie is just a tourist trap, but it’s good to get a context of the wall and the ghost stations on the U-Bahn in the area. Berlin has been kind to me. It’s the sort of city that welcomes visitors and looks after them. I hope to return here again soon.

I’m on the IC147 (Inter-City) from Amsterdam to Berlin. It might lack a glamorous train name, but it feels to me like a good one – taking a pretty direct route east to my destination in a little over six hours. I’m used to getting the night train out of Holland, so very much enjoying a daytime alternative this year.

The IC147 isn’t a (high speed) ICE train, but a modern and efficient inter-city express. In first class the carriage has mini compartments of six seats. This is an interesting alternative to the anonymity of the open plan that I’m used to in the United Kingdom. Here people introduce themselves and chat a bit more. It also gives me the very slight feeling of what it must be like to be a POW escapee. I assume this is because in my mind all the WW2 films I have seen involving German trains have carriages like this. To be fair, I think this layout was once the fashion across both Great Britain and much of Europe.

A quick trip to the “Bordobistro” carriage doesn’t disappoint – a full menu, and best of all icy Erdinger beer served in immaculate tall and gleaming branded glasses. The manager pops by my compartment every now and again to take my order – not on a tablet device, but hand written on a beer mat. Old school!

I wasnt expecting it, but at the German border the locomotive was switched from a Dutch railways engine to a DB Bahn loco. It takes just ten minutes to change the crew, change the loco and set off again. The German conductor is very friendly and enthusiastic about her job. She speaks at least three languages. I feel just like I did whilst I was in Japan last year – rather embarrassed that my own country can’t run a railway of this quality. There seems to be a totally different culture and passion for getting it right, but that’s probably down to decades of investment in people and infrastructure.

I spend a couple of hours in the company of a Dutch chap who looks just like Mick Fleetwood. It could of course be that Mick Fleetwood does a brilliant Dutch accent impersonation and was having some fun at my expense. Whilst on the subject of music, I hope you like the subtle homage of the title of this post to Gerry Rafferty and his epic 1978 album of the same name.

I’m actually really pleased to have been hit by a minor train based crisis today. I needed something to rebase my reactions to a relatively minor travel problem in the grand plan. The experience has instantly given me back my train mojo. I’m not a religious person, but it has also given me a great lesson in having faith, both in myself and in those around me.

My journey started off auspiciously enough in Amsterdam, when my ICE 227 train whirred out of the station and whizzed down the line in the direction of Frankfurt (carriage 29, seat 71 for the record). My first destination was due to be Oberhausen, the new start point for the cut back EN447 “Jan Kiepura” service to Warsaw.

So I settled in and relaxed, knowing I had a 76 minute layover between the two trains. About 90 minutes into the two hour trip all the connecting passengers were summoned to the Bordbistro (bar car), towards the middle of the train. The guards have a neat little office there. It turns out the overhead electrification had totally failed at Emmerich (close to the German border) and we were going to be stranded. What was the plan..? “Go back to your seat, we are working on it” was the loose translation, so I did as I was told. About half an hour later I was summoned again (and this time told to bring my luggage) along with all the passengers connecting east to Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Warsaw. Organised chaos, with lots of luggage.

Clearly no one was too impressed by the situation, but no one was complaining either. What you could see in the bar were four DB Bahn employees working on a cunning plan – several in fact.. The first wasn’t actually that cunning – get the connecting passengers separated from the others and sneak them quickly off on a bus to our destination, maybe half an hour away, where we could possibly still make our original connections. Cutting a long story short, the bus didn’t turn up fast enough and we were not going to make it.

Much discussion in three languages on the wet and windy platform (now at Wessel) and plan C was hastily devised – take a bus from Wessel to Dortmund where we might be able to catch the now missed connection to Warsaw and Prague. At this point I didn’t have a map, but I remember the rather circuitous route of the train that went from Arnhem to Cologne and then back towards Dortmund in a “v” shaped journey south then doubling back to the north east. I didn’t hold out much hope, but had little option than to go with the flow. Once we were all on the bus, I booted up my Google map and lo and behold, it did seem possible with some luck. My train that had left Oberhausen at 21.30 didn’t leave Dortmund until 23.56. It felt a bit like a “Top Gear Challenge” – Matthew in the bus, Jurgen in the train, who will get to Dortmund Hbf first?

I was ready for a bit of a panic stricken arrival at Dortmund, but in the end we actually arrived there with more than 20 minutes in hand – so I got to make my first ever “Silver Streak” connection – it’s the one where you miss your train but catch it up by other means, and manage to get back on it. It’s worth 1000 points in your I-Spy book of international rail travel..!

A brief reflection on the experience. Firstly there was my poor reaction to a problem that I couldn’t control. I have given myself a good talking too, as there is just absolutely no point in thinking negatively – I should take solace that I didn’t get at all angry about it though. Secondly the black comedy. There was a moment when I realised a functional toilet might be hours away and had to get back on the train with my luggage out on the platform. At which point whilst doing my business, I thought the train was about to leave the station. This resulted in an emergency evacuation before the doors were closed! Thirdly the camaraderie of my fellow passengers, who were all brilliant at translating for each other and helping each other with luggage. Fourthly, the leadership and professionalism of the DB guards who donned fluorescent bibs, got their phones out, fixed our problem and took us like refugees to Dortmund. I’m not sure that would ever happen in the UK.

Let’s hope this will be the only glitch in this year’s mission!