One writer, one Interrail pass and a wildly over-ambitious, 37-stop journey to test railway accessibility in Europe. Wanstead-based travel writer Carole Edrich presents the first instalment of her Big Rail Story
It doesn’t take a genius to predict that writing about a 17-day, 37-stop rail tour in one feature might be a challenge. With 1,000 words for everything, no context, introduction or ending, just the trip in its entirety, that’s 13 words per theme. So, I’m clearly not a genius!
I’ve wanted to cover railway accessibility in Europe for a very long time. Desperately, passionately and ultimately impractically. I’ve been working on it for years. Luckily, I have a Schrödinger’s travel column. I might know the locations and even the theme, but like the cat in the box, until the piece achieves its final form, it exists in a superposition of witty narrative and total disaster. There’s literally no way of knowing what the content will be.
I did it! Rail Travel as a Radical Form of Self-Care was in Disability Review Magazine last month. In my head (and all the filing), it’s called Big Rail. I’m not a genius, remember? If I am, it’s the kind of genius who plans a 37-stop trip without considering her word count.
This is the beginning of a much longer series where I’m not stuck to 13 words for each station and each trip between them, where I can explain how smells alone make Brussels North feel rather scary and Brussels South like a trip to a favourite aunt. This is the fuller memorandum, and where the Big Rail Challenge story begins.
I’ve never understood why people get super-early flights. They have to start far too early, spend more money than they’ve saved on the flight on the taxi to the airport, travel with other tired and moody people and can’t properly appreciate their first day in a new place. I thought of this when booking Eurostar. Deliberately got the second train out of St Pancras so I could comfortably get there by Tube.
On the day, there was a Tube strike. I told myself I’d walk to Stratford Station, but found myself booking a cab. Consoled myself with the knowledge that since my first-class, 14-travel-day Interrail pass included – and cost the same as – a return Eurostar trip, all other travel would be free. I was wrong. Magnificently wrong. Wrong in ways I had never imagined. Genius? Me?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Nine in the morning at St Pancras International is where past tense ends and present begins. Where plans meet reality. Where the route I spent over five days researching meets Europe’s incontrovertibly inconsistent interpretation of ‘accessible’, ‘on time’ and ‘destination’. Where 13 words per segment is as far from my mind as it’s possible to travel. The most mindful, mindless, meandering, muddled, marvellous train trip of my life. My Big Rail Story starts here.
For relevant links to the places, to read more of Carole’s work or to listen to her podcast, visit wnstd.com/edrich
