From the sleeper train, with love
It has never made logical sense for Bond to choose a train over a plane, but that hasn’t stopped the 007 series making sleeper trains synonymous with romance and excitement. Why fly when you can travel by rail?
We didn’t plan to take the train. The sad collapse of our favourite budget airline just weeks before our trip to Edinburgh meant flight was no longer a possibility. We were left with a quandary: cancel the whole trip or find another way to get there? Driving to Edinburgh from the West Midlands would take up to around 6 hours. 6 hours might not seem like a lot to some (some of our American friends would not consider 6 hours especially onerous) but neither of us really enjoy driving, especially over any distance. We considered taking a train but it would take us over 4 hours there and (for reasons that weren’t clear - maintenance works?) 6 hours back. And with many train services being notoriously unreliable at the moment, we thought better of it.
But then my husband reminded me that we had always wanted to try the Caledonian Sleeper, which runs from London Euston to Edinburgh. We had been on sleeper trains twice before. The first time on our honeymoon, back in 2015, when we took the Amtrak ‘Sunset Limited’ service from New Orleans to Los Angeles. It was a glorious 48 hours (24 of which were spent clickety-clacking our way across the truly epic Texas), during which we discovered that it’s not only possible to sleep on a train but also very easy to do so, the gentle undulations lulling you into slumber.
Our next sleeper experience was back in the UK, from London Paddington to Penzance, at the end of Cornwall. We enjoyed the experience immensely, although perhaps because the train was travelling quite fast through the night on windy tracks along the coast, sleep was not so easy to come by, at least for my husband, who had chosen the top bunk. Wary of this, before we booked tickets on the UK’s other sleeper train, the Caledonian Sleeper, Antony insisted he go on the bottom bunk, closer to the centre of gravity. I acceded, too excited about just going on the Sleeper to argue, and went ahead and booked us in.
At around twice the price of budget airline tickets for a ‘Classic’ room, the Calendonian Sleeper service is not, on the surface of it at least, cheap. But the benefits are legion: for a start, you don’t have to use an airport, which I always view as a necessary evil of long distance travel. Secondly, you can feel virtuous, knowing your carbon footprint is infinitesimal when you use a train compared with using a plane. Furthermore, you not only save the planet but - potentially - your own money. Although the Sleeper tickets are not cheap, travelling through the night means you don’t have to fork out for as many nights in a hotel. We had two full days in Edinburgh and only had to pay for one night, compared with two or three if we had flown. Incidentally, there is another Sleeper option which is only a fraction of the price of a room: a sleeper seat. On the other side of the price range, there are larger bedrooms which were beyond the scope of our wallets. Going with the classic room option rather than book multiple nights in a hotel essentially enabled us to break even… well, that’s how I’m thinking of it anyway. To be honest, it was worth paying a bit more than we would have to fly because - and this is the dealbreaker - we got to spend the night on a train!
There’s something incredibly alluring about a sleeper train. This, despite the fact that in the Bond series, sleeper trains are the locations of some of 007’s most violent encounters. There’s the combat at close quarters with Red Grant in From Russia With Love. Then there’s the showdown with Tee Hee’s metal claw in Live and Let Die. Poor Tee Hee is not the only villain to end up being defenestrated by Bond; metal-mouthed Jaws gets thrown from the train in a similar fashion in The Spy Who Loved Me. In Spectre, Mr Hinx smashes up the whole of the restaurant car before Bond and Madeleine get him over a barrel.
Perhaps it’s because the fighting is so circumscribed by the environment - a train never being that large, even in countries with rails, and therefore carriages, wider than those in the UK - that these encounters are so visceral.
Being in close proximity also helps fuel romantic and/or sexual attraction. In each film where Bond boards a night train, he does so with a woman: Tatiana and Bond escape Istanbul on the Orient Express. Like all of the train journeys in Bond, this makes next to no logical sense. Why not fly instead, thereby reaching safety a heck of a lot more quickly? In the novel of From Russia, With Love, using the train is called out by Bond himself as being preposterous. Why, he asks Tatiana, should they make themselves an easy target for 4 or 5 days on a train? Her point blank refusal to go to London by plane (something her SMERSH handlers have insisted can not happen) is all Bond needs to hear to acquiesce. One can almost see Fleming telling the reader: just go with it folks… the rest of the book will be much more exciting if the characters go by train! And he was right of course.
Fleming was hardly the first writer to realise the dramatic potential of overnight train travel. He was drawing on a rich tradition, established by writers like Graham Greene, who published an Orient Express-set thriller, Stamboul Train, in 1932. Two years later it was adapted for the screen. Also in 1934, Agatha Christie published what was to become the most famous train-set story of all, Murder on the Orient Express, although this was not her first - or last - mystery to be set on rails.
All of these stories share a message: it’s not the destination that counts, it’s what happens along the way…
The other Bond novel to feature a sleeper train journey is Live and Let Die, in which Fleming tells us “[Bond] loved trains and he looked forward with excitement to the rest of the journey."
When I read this for the first time as a train-loving youth, this reinforced the kinship I felt with Bond: another thing we had in common!
Nothing of particularly dramatic note happens during the train journey in the novel of Live and Let Die: Bond and Solitaire merely use it as a way of getting from point A to point B, and spend the time getting to know each other. This sequence, in the first half of the novel, was omitted when this title was - very loosely adapted into film. Bond and Solitaire do board a train right at the end of the Live and Let Die film though, with Felix expressing his - and perhaps the audience’s - incomprehension at their choice of transportation method: “I still don’t see why you want to travel this way. What the hell can the two of you do on the train for 16 hours?” The looks on Roger’s and Jane’s faces tell us all we need to know.
Roger was the only Bond - until Daniel Craig - to ride the rails overnight twice. The Spy Who Loved Me’s sleeper train sequence doesn’t even attempt to disguise its raison d’etre: it’s purely there to get the British and Russian agents into bed for a spot of detente. Having Jaws interrupt gives them the excuse they need to share a compartment. It’s only when you stop to consider how long it would take to travel the 2000+ miles from Egypt to Sardinia that you realise how contrived the whole thing is.
The train sequence in Spectre is very similar, even down to Bond and this film’s Girl, Madeleine Swann, being unable to take their hands off each other after fending off an attack. There’s a semi-feasible reason for them to take the train: their destination is somewhere in the middle of the desert, away from large settlements. But it’s still flimsy, and in reality, the filmmakers have them travel via rail to recall to our memories an earlier scene in the Daniel Craig era: when Bond meets Vesper for the first time.
The Casino Royale sleeper train scene is perhaps the most inexplicable of all, from a story logic point of view. A blink and you’ll miss it station sign shows them to be travelling through Switzerland, over 600 miles from Montenegro. There’s no rational reason for them to take the train considering that Bond has, in the previous scene, been shown to be in the Bahamas and Vesper has presumably come from her offices at HM Treasury in London. But the real reason for having the characters meet on a train is to set up the ultimate meet cute, echoing scenes from cinema history, most significantly Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, where Cary Grant’s advertising executive - falsely identified as a spy - makes the acquaintance of Eva Marie Saint’s mysterious blonde, who turns out to be the real spy.
Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Hitchcock exploited the possibility that we may find romance - and danger - when meeting a stranger on a train. The Bond series has kept these possibilities and associations with sleeper trains alive for decades, long after it ceased to make any logical sense for Bond to choose a train over a plane.
I would love to be able to report that our overnight journey to Scotland was as rich in incident as a Fleming thriller, that my husband and me faced off foes augmented with metal or had an altercation with a fellow passenger after they committed a faux pas by ordering the wrong wine. I would love to be able to tell you that, in the grand Bond tradition, we found the whole experience of sleeping on a train so much of an aphrodisiac that we couldn’t take our hands off each other, spending the majority of the journey in a state of conjoined conjugal bliss. But this would have meant working around the constraint of being in bunk beds. And when two men, both nearly six feet tall, are expending so much of their vital energies on trying hard not to bang their heads on the bed or ceiling above, they don’t have sufficient energy left for anything else.
We pulled into Edinburgh Waverley station not long after dawn, feeling mostly refreshed and ready to explore a city we had not visited for more than a decade. No passport control, no security checks… we just stepped onto the platform, found the exit and walked the five minutes or so to our hotel, where we dropped our bags and then headed out.
Bond films always show us life with the boring bits cut out. This includes the travails of travel by airline. Most of the occasions where Bond does fly, we cut from the plane taking off to him arriving at his destination. But when he takes the train it’s different. Across the Bond series as a whole, we spend significant amounts of screentime experiencing train travel with him.
Perhaps we should paraphrase the Jack London quote used as Bond’s epitaph here:
‘I shall not waste my days in trying to make all of my toiletries under 100ml fit into the small plastic bag thingy and then wait around in a soulless departure lounge. I shall use my time and take the train instead.’
You can find out about the Caledonian Sleeper and book your tickets here: https://www.sleeper.scot/
