George Behrend (1922–2010)

A new edition of a railway classic, this book recounts the story of a trip taken by George Behrend and Vincent Kelly to Turkey in 1966. In those days, there was little affordable air travel, and the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) was still an economical (if not cheap) way to travel across Europe to the gates of the Middle East. Indeed, it was possible, with the right connections, to travel by rail from Paris all the way to Damascus, Beirut or Baghdad.

Behrend and Kelly were residents of Jersey, and so joined their train in Paris (assuming that they took a ferry to St.Malo, an account of their journey to Paris in those days would itself have been of interest!), from where they were in the caring hands of the CIWL all the way to Turkey and well into the interior, for the CIWL had the concession to operate restaurant cars and sleepers within the country at that time. And caring hands they were, too; this book arose out of an approach from the Turkish Ministry of Tourism, presumably after seeing Behrend's earlier book on the history of the CIWL. He and Kelly were afforded every courtesy, escorted by senior officials and given a lot of access to see behind the scenes. This came in useful when they insisted on visiting Kars, in the far east of the country; Kars in the 1960s was fairly rough (anyone who saw Chris Tarrant's tv documentary in his 'Extreme Railway Journeys' series will know that it is still rather basic), and Behrend and Kelly's attempts to find an acceptable hotel there failed utterly. In desperation, they returned to their sleeping car, supposedly locked up in a siding ready to be attached to the return service the next day, only to find their beds made up as if they were expected, despite this definitely not being company policy! (Lest anyone think they were being afforded special treatment, this was a timetabled working.)

Reading this book 55 years on, one is struck by how much the world has changed. World events that Behrend mentions in passing are history to us now. Interestingly, the language does not come over as old-fashioned, and there are very few, if any, things in his account which would wound modern sensibilities.

The Orient Express, in the form of through coaches from Paris to Istanbul, persisted until 1977; the name continued on an ever-decreasing service of through coaches until 2007, by which time the service existed in name only, being a named night train of the Austrian state railways for its EuroNacht service between Vienna and Paris. The Austrians are re-introducing night trains as world opinion swings away from environmentally damaging air services and back to slower, gentler forms of travel, though the opulence of the classic Orient Express is unlikely to return for the ordinary traveller. The mantle of the classic Orient Express has now been taken up with services aimed specifically at tourists; but in Behrend's time, the service was still run as an integral part of the continental transport network.

Behrend's book first appeared in 1969 from his local publisher, Jersey Artists. This edition of the book was the idea of Paul Catchpole, who reset the book in a different format, and added contemporary photographs. (Like many monochrome photographs in books of this sort, their tonal range is quite restricted.) The book has been slightly edited to remove travel information that has long since ceased to have any validity, but it is otherwise unchanged from its 1969 text. There is a map, which like so many other maps of this sort in other publications, does not show a number of places mentioned in the text; a comparison with an up-to-date one in my possession shows that lines which in 1966 were "projected" were still to be built in 2020. And the conflicting needs of the general reader of travel books and the railway enthusiast are catered for by adding a chapter at the end which recapitulates Behrend and Kelly's journey, but with details of the locomotives and other items of railway detail that the general reader would shy away from.

Nonetheless, this is a valuable addition to the library of anyone with an interest in overseas railways, and it stands up well despite the passage of time. It is a book worth looking out for.… (més)

This was published in 1965, a few years after my first visit to Switzerland, so a lot of it serves to remind me of that trip. Plenty of black and white photos of the then-current scene, but there is one "prophet of doom section that makes me smile - the author predicted that global warming would ensure that the Aletsch Glacier would disappear by 1980. Wrong; it's still there - a little smaller, maybe, but still there! A good book to use to reminisce. When I saw it on the library sale shelf, I made sure i bought it there and then… (més)