THEY told me to arrive fifty minutes before my train to Larisa, it may take a while to buy a ticket, they said. The queue was just a few people deep at the Departures on the Same Day booth, but I hadn’t reckoned on the steady stream of small old ladies with large suitcases who were cheerfully encouraged to push their way to the front, so that in 20 minutes I found myself further away from the ticket office than when I started. But it seemed only fair that these diminutive souls with the weight of the family on their bent shoulders should have some advantage in life, and how could I complain when at least I wasn’t being propelled forward with them.
Finally, the ticket officer beams at me. “First class, Larisa.” I say, “Special train,” he beams. “Kala,” I say. “Nai, kala.” My four-hour journey costs only €11.30 and the Express arrives like an ocean liner, blowing its fog horn, exactly on time. Trains, I love them, especially these old European ones, which need crampons to mount the iron steps: the north face of Mt Pullman. Anonymous helping hands push my buttocks from behind, others heaving from the front, I feel like planting a flag.
The first class compartment is comfortably old world, carpeted floors and heavy green brocade curtains. A small group is already congregated on leatherette stools in the bar drinking half finished bottles of ouzo. They are discussing last night’s PASOK election result, discussing is the wrong word, they are all shouting at once and waving their arms around. I think they must agree with each other. The man next to me smiles. He’s German. “So you going to Kalamata, yah?” “Nein, Larisa,” I say smug, at my polyglotness. It takes a moment; he is searching for the words. “You not Kalamata, wrong back, front go,” and he pushes me out of my seat. I tumble back on to the platform, like someone being evicted by bouncers from a club. The station guard with scarlet cap, gold lapels, flag, whistle and huge stopwatch is about to blow dead on the hour. I scramble as an ungainly goat into the other first class coach. Now I know why it is ‘special train”, like a worm, it divides in half at the first set of points to wriggle its way across the mountains of Greece in opposite directions.
It seems the same set of men are arguing over the same election result in the bar here too, but I am wrong they are louder, wilder, drinking tsipouro from Trikala, they urge me to try it, down in one, like a vodka shot. The bottle says 50 per cent: I decline politely. There is something relaxing about train journeys in foreign lands, you feel reflective, like the half glimpsed view of yourself in the glass. There but not there, partially imprinted on the landscape. And the landscape of inland Greece is timeless. Fields of cotton line the railway tracks, shepherds herd flocks by the line, distant villages cling to tree clad mountains, but mostly there is mile on mile of emptiness: gorges and peaks. The first rains have finally come, after the long hot summer, and occasionally there is a distant brilliant glow as farmers are once more confident to clear their land.
I think of those hobos in America who spend their whole lives riding the railroad, as the wheel noise lullabies me into a stupor, it is easy to see why. Trains fill you will hope, in a way that no other form of transport ever does. Maybe it’s their directness, their sense of going somewhere. Maybe it’s the safe constant rhythm of the tracks, maybe it’s everyone reading, as if quietly at home on a sleepy Sunday. But as the hours pass I could happily travel forever: the ticket office to Other Destinations on Another Day had offered Albania, Bulgaria… so who knows…
