Fast-track to life on the rails, please

After two weeks of personal improvement, home-cooked meals, spontaneous rounds of drinks at the local by our office and the aggravation that comes with working with British builders, Monday marked the start of Mom’s birthday week.

While Mats stayed behind to work on the opening of his new men’s store (and babysit the builders), Mom and I grabbed the train to Paris mid-morning.

As we settled in with our papers, magazines and coffees, I watched fellow passengers walking along the platform and found myself wondering why people insist on travelling with those inflatable neck doughnuts fully inflated? Isn’t the point that you pack them in your luggage and then inflate them rather than tethering them to your rolling backpack? Mom was more baffled by the pillow people who were shuffling along a carriage with their enormous pillows sagging over their luggage. “Why do you need to travel with a massive pillow?” she asked. Do people travel with pillows because they have allergies or because they have poor sleep habits? How many pillowcases do they travel with? Do they feel a certain kinship with other pillow folk?

As the train pulled out of St Pancras my attention was drawn to a story in one of the papers about North Korea’s “Dear Leader”. As we sped through suburban London I thought about Kim Jong-il’s charming and wholly sensible travel habits and how he gets so little credit for travelling by train. Given his appalling behaviour (a starving population, poor human rights records, nuclear naughtiness and a lack of respect for borders) it’s understandable that his green credentials for longish haul travel go unrecognised but Big Kim might be on to something with his private rail carriages and leisurely approach to covering long distances. In fact, he could be an example for all leaders to spend a little more time on the ground, surveying the train rather than hurtling from A to B without taking in (and analysing) the view.

Of course there would be security issues for the US with “Railforce One” but there’d also be plenty of advantages that would come with taking the train – chances to stop off to kiss babies and high-five farmers, more space for extra staff and an expanded press corps and then the green halo effect of leading by example. In the UK, where there’s no longer a discussion about a “Blairforce One” let alone a pint-sized coalition jet (the PM will continue to charter a commercial aircraft for most long-haul travel), rail could also be a better option for getting around the country and strengthening ties with the continent. It could be the engine for the much needed infrastructure revolution. It would also give the UK’s new leaders (all leaders in fact) a daily, visual reminder of what life is like at street level and out in the provinces. Regular journeys through toxic parts of New Jersey, neighbourhoods in Manchester and forgotten stretches of France might speed up much-needed social programmes and environmental improvements.

Surveying the tatty, cramped Eurostar carriage I started imagining what a bespoke carriage would look like and how different Mom’s birthday tour might be. The London-Paris-Helsinki-London-Beirut itinerary would be a much improved version of journeying on the Orient-Express. I’d opt to have the fixed elements of the carriage interior designed by Stockholm-based architect Andreas Martin-Löf and incorporate rugs woven by Swedish firm Kasthall, teak panelling and matt gold aluminium trim. With good planning I reckon there’d be room for about four private couchettes, a galley kitchen, two full bathrooms and a generous salon with sofas, tables and seating from Carl Malmsten, Artek and fabrics by Johanna Gullichsen.

Rather than checking into a hotel in Paris, we’d spend the night in the carriage and then journey to Finland overnight the next day.

In the European rail network of my dreams there’d be special roll-on/roll-off ferries to accommodate rail carriages at all sensible sea crossings and the network infrastructure would be designed to maximise overnight travel. The more I thought about this new life in the “fast track”, I was wondering how much a carriage refit would really cost and how complicated it would be to journey around Europe hitched to the back of a regular passenger service. I think I might have drifted off just weighing up the complexities of the whole exercise.

By the time we pulled into the Gare du Nord my optimism was restored when I saw some very handsome old SNCF carriages parked in a railway yard and thought about how easy it would be to conduct business, take holidays and travel at a different pace around Europe without the headaches of air traffic control and weather delays and the inconsistencies that come with hotel stays. I just might get Andreas to sharpen his pencil and I’ll let you know when it’s “all aboard”.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine

tyler.brule@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/brule