6:47am. A third floor room in Hotel Crna Gora, Podgorica. I stare at the digital time display in disbelief. The train for Belgrade leaves at 7:05am. We have to be on that train. Somehow – be it by adrenaline, by fortune or by complex time worm-hole – in eighteen minutes we manage to dress, pack, get down the stairs to the lobby, pay up, check out and get a taxi to the station. Subsequently twenty minutes after waking we are on a train and heading upwards and northwards into the mountains.
The railway climbs steeply. The first three stations at which the train stops are so high in the landscape – with near vertical mountain on one side of the track and a cliff dropping to the valley below on the other – that they are somewhat ironically only accessible by train. At one small station, somewhere near Verusa, there are just eight houses within sight and they’re on the other side of the valley. As we pull away, the one passenger to have alighted here can be seen trudging back down the track to cross back over the viaduct, presumably all the time whilst muttering to himself about the ‘stupid station’ on the ‘wrong side of the stupid valley’.
Ordinarily the long journey through the mountains would offer the perfect opportunity to regain some sleep. However, one man stands in our way. Half human, half loudspeaker. He’s the guy manning the train’s buffet car, and he’s the loudest and most animated soul to have ever walked the earth – the living embodiment of Foghorn Leghorn. Not only does he talk non-stop, he has just a single volume setting; intolerable. We’re not even sat in the buffet car. We’re in the next carriage along and still there’s no escaping the man. After about an hour of him chuntering back and forth, Shaun, a fellow Welshman in the seat behind, sighs wearily “I thought my missus could talk”.
Briefly and pleasantly all is quiet for a couple of minutes, but alas it turns out to be just the eye in his storm. Suddenly he appears right in the middle of our carriage barking instructions and jokes at no-one in particular before deciding to assist an elderly passenger with his mobile phone. “Oh don’t get him involved, he’s clearly not a phone expert,” Ralph pleads with the pensioner. Despite this loud un-assistance, to no-one’s surprise, whatever is wrong with the old man’s phone continues to be wrong with the old man’s phone. The only constructive advice comes from Shaun who points out “You’re in a tunnel mate”.
From then on, at regular intervals, the buffet-car man tears through the carriage like a tornado ploughing through a music shop. Each time he passes he pauses from his dramatics only to offer us a coffee or a sandwich. On the rare occasions the buffet car operator does finally fall silent his constant drone is replaced by that of a portable radio in his kitchen blaring out Serbian folk music. When he recommences his yelling, the folk music quietens. I’m fairly certain he and the radio are running off the same battery.
As we approach the border at Bijela Polja he’s already pulled down a window; “He’s talking to some poor sod outside now”. A Montenegrin border guard has come aboard and is looking closely at my passport. Noticing the town of birth he remarks “Ah Doncaster, good football” and moves on to the rest of the carriage before my jaw has completed its drop. A few minutes later, as we wait for the train to move on, the same border guard, now on the platform, edges toward our carriage window gesturing for us to open it. Ralph is reluctant to do so, expecting a request for a bribe to get the train moving. Instead what we get is “St James Park… Newcastle, yes?” And with train going nowhere just yet, the guard continues to test his knowledge of English football grounds with us. “Er, Villa Park, Aston Villa. Anfield Road, Liverpool? Tottenham, White, er, White Hart Lane. Elland Road, Leeds. Old Trafford is Manchester”. Just as we’re starting to worry we’re going to be here all the way to Aldershot Town, the train creaks and cranks forwards; the border guard changing tack to perform a Norman Wisdom-esque jog alongside the train, before waving us goodbye.
Next to stand between us and sleep is the ticket inspector, a mis-match of 1980s television comedy characters. He has the stature and style of Mike from The Young Ones and wears the kind of long leather jacket only previously sported by the Gestapo in ‘Allo ‘Allo. Inevitably he’s followed through the carriage by our favourite caterer offering us a sandwich. Again. Ralph elects to go and see what all the fuss is about and returns to inform us there is just one sandwich, sat forlornly on a plate, mummified in Cling Film. Collectively we come to the conclusion that it’s a fake sandwich glued to the counter, and the guy spends the best part of every day trying to talk some schmuck into taking it at which point hilarity ensues.
At Priboj in south-west Serbia we take on buffet car supplies, and though we only seem to stop for a matter of seconds the Montenegrin Manuel goes on to lumber through our carriage with no fewer than five tea-urns and ten beer barrels; one for each of the customers he’s had in the past four hours. Additional sandwich supplies are notable only by their absence.
Slowly the scenery becomes less dramatic and more hospitable as we travel northwards. Somewhere north of Kosjerić, in a brief moment of quiet, we pass a Serbian funeral procession; a line of people walking solemnly down the road from a village towards a small track-side graveyard. At the graveyard a small number of mourners await, tending a long table, laid out with a white tablecloth atop. It’s a touching scene, the silence adding to the jarring solemnity.
Now on the approach to Belgrade the landscape has raced away, but so too has the time – the train is running very late. We are already destined to arrive an hour behind schedule as we enter the city limits, and the delay does not seem set to shorten as we grind to a halt at a large station, which is not merely deserted, it’s not even finished. We are not moving. A local commuter train passes us. And then another. We still sit here with no announcement as to why and no chance of understanding even if there were one.
Other passengers begin to get off the train, dropping down to the track level and traipsing down the unfinished platform. In front of the train they cross the line and clamber up an embankment towards a main road. Another train pulls in behind, and a number of its passengers too make the decision to risk life and limb rather than wait out the delay. We stubbornly stay in the latter group of reasoning, and are rewarded for our patience a mere forty minutes later as the train finally begins to move, open carriage doors flapping unsafely in the breeze.
Joy however very quickly turns to confusion. As the train crosses the Sava River we realise the city of Belgrade is quite clearly on the bank which we are heading away from. The train is no longer heading to Belgrade, but instead to New Belgrade, a decaying concrete station which sits in the shadow of decaying concrete tower blocks. Either the Serbian people are big on irony, or the era in which this truly was New Belgrade came under a decidedly different regime. Here, as the setting sun reflects off the remaining windows of the looming towers we sit and wait again. We are now two hours late.
As we wait a train guard passes through the carriage with a small handheld electrical device. When he had passed by before we had presumed this to be an essential piece of railway technology, but now on closer inspection we can see it’s actually a small television on which he is watching Serbia play Croatia at basketball. “Whats the score?” asks Shaun. Serbia are winning and the guard continues cheerily down the train. “I can’t help but feel more pressing and relevant questions could have been asked there” laments Ralph.
By now the engine has crawled from one end of the train to the other and we are – as we approach the twelve-hour mark of what should be a nine-hour journey – seemingly ready to head into Belgrade for a second and hopefully final time. But before we can leave we need the signal from the station master and eventually she struts into view, in heels and a pencil skirt. She is the station master you would only ordinarily see cast in a Benny Hill sketch. Truly stunning. She raises her paddle to signal to the driver like a game show hostess demonstrating this week’s star prize. Her employment is a clever ploy by the Serbian Railways, the three-hour delay to our journey having long been forgotten as we all hang out the window to bid the station master dovidenja.
Finally we lurch back over the Sava and in to the heart of Belgrade as the sun begins to set a deep summer yellow over the city. The train slows to a crawl as it rounds a bend and further down the train we can see a couple of guys hanging out the window clapping encouragement to the engine. We join them; urging the driver onwards with applause. Come on, we’re so close. Thankfully it does the trick. Having left Podgorica at five past seven, we arrive in Belgrade at five past seven. A twelve-hour journey it transpires is long enough to silence even the most ardent buffet car attendants, but not quite long enough to make anyone touch his sandwich.
platform four 