On an Overnight Train in Romania

70p beers in a chintzy carriage

In this world of £8.99 flights to the second city of some country in Europe it is incredibly easy to pop somewhere for a few days, have a quick look around, and if you’re not convinced then you only wasted 20 quid on a weekend away. Getting somewhere has never been easier, and you no longer need to invest time in your destination. On my travels I have met competitive travellers, country tickers who aim to set foot on the territory of every country on earth, and much like beer tickers who want to have only a little sip of that white whale, just a short amount of time will do.

To me this is a wasteful form of travel, being somewhere to achieve an arbitrary goal rather than actually experience a place seems to be borne of some compulsion to achieve boasting rights rather than to travel for the sheer delight of travel. Travel is a pleasure and a privilege and I don’t see the appeal of going somewhere simply to say I’ve been there, aloofly passing through without engaging or even really observing.

It is one thing to lack an investment in your destination, and another to lack it in your transportation. I am guilty of the £8.99 flight, and have found myself stuck in cities such as Sarajevo (a delightful place, but not great to weather out a storm) as well as missing a connection in Larnaca due to the allure of a cheap flight with a fast turnaround. That one ended up costing me £300 in a hotel and replacement flights the next day.

There is a certain amount of pleasure to be taken in slow travel though, with writers such as Paul Theroux writing about his train journeys, well, just about everywhere. Recently when trying to get to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, I was faced with a choice between a £250 flight or a £35 overnight train from Bucharest. Being both a bit skint, and quite fond of trains, I decided on the latter.

This train has been plying its trade on the Bucharest-Chisinau line for decades, once it linked Bulgaria with the USSR, via socialist Romania, but today it runs between the two capitals, and is a well-used relic that symbolises brotherly friendship between the two nations. The train is now called Prietenia (Friendship), and every evening it departs Bucharest’s Gara du Nord station for the slow meander to the Moldovan border, where your passport is checked and the train gauge changed at 3am, before it finally makes its way into Chisinau at 9am the next morning. The reverse journey sees you at the border at a much more reasonable hour, but you get into Bucharest at 6am.

Booking the train is easy, you simply order from the Moldovan railway website and print it off, no complicated collections or checks. We did have to buy both tickets separately, but still ended up in the same berth. I decided on first class, mostly because I was travelling with my boyfriend and didn’t want to be split up according to sex, as you are when booking via the Romanian site. We arrived about an hour before departure, but there was no need, the platform wasn't announced until 20 minutes before we left, and boarding was simple and we were ensconced in our cabin within about 5 minutes. I would recommend bringing drinks and snacks for the train though, at the end of august the cabin was swelteringly hot, and the bar carriage only carried small snacks, two litre water bottles are needed.

The departures board at Bucharest Gara du Nord

The train station itself is dark, busy, and there were lots of people on the make so truthfully, like most railway stations, the less time spent there the better. There is a McDonalds though.

The train itself dates from the 1970’s, and even though the toilets are a little basic, with the flush simply being a water propelled opening onto the dark tracks below, everything else is quite comfy and modern. A recent upgrade has seen power sockets installed, and the lighting is bright with the option to use a reading lamp by your bunk should you choose. There is no air conditioning, just a window, but by the time the train is passing through the fields of Romania the heat of the city has dissipated into a cool breeze. Other than a slightly nerve-wracking walk between carriages to get to the bar car, everything is very pleasant.

The loo

Inside the cabin there are two bunks at seat level, two mirrors, and a small shelf, as well as a table which some reports state is decorated with plastic flowers, but ours was lacking this particular detail. The bunks are covered in a very grand red and gold satin fabric, with blue Chinoiserie curtains. In the hallway the carpets and curtains are golden, harking back to the more resplendent days of overnight train travel.

Inside the Prietenia first-class cabin

Unlike other overnight trains you are left to build your own bed on the Prietenia, the guard hands you a neatly folded bundle of sheets and pillowcases, alongside a tea towel (still not sure what this is for) and you make your bed on the chintzy red banquette using the roll up mattress stored inside. There’s plenty of space to store your bags, and even when the border guards come round at 3am they are pleasant and friendly.

Reading accounts of taking the train, as well as watching some deliberately inflammatory YouTube videos (Taking the HELL SOVIET train! This Train will SHOCK you!! Never Take THIS TRAIN!!! etc) had prepared me for something slightly challenging and confrontational, but it was all very lovely. The bucolic countryside went past, with the odd industrial facility to remind you where you are, the bar car had plenty of beer and brandy and now takes credit card, so you can get gently buzzed watching the fields whizz in modern comfort.

The beer on offer was Moldovan (the train is operated by the Moldovan railway authority) and you can get a 500ml bottle of Chisinau lager for a mere 70p. Owned by Efes, the lager is a 4.5% blonde lager with a really crisp and fresh finish. The brewery employs a Merlin wort boiler, which utilises a thin film of wort passing over a heated cone to boil the wort and expel compounds such as DMS (sweetcorn) and other volatiles, resulting a very energy efficient process that delivers a consistent and clean beer. Taste wise- there’s not a lot to write home about, but it’s a really good lager, with a solid malt and hop character that’s well balanced to a slight sweetness. Chisinau beer accounts for 70% of lager sales in Moldova, but craft beer is getting a foothold in the capital. On the Prietenia you can have Chisinau.

The bar carriage consists of a sealed kiosk, where you order your beers, along with a standing table and fully descending windows, so you can get a refreshing wind blast as you watch the sun set. No one else came to join us as we had two beers, before heading to bed early to get some sleep before the border checks. Maybe it got rowdier as the night went on, but it was sedate and slow when we were in.

The border checks are not as bad as you might think. About 10 minutes beforehand the guard wakes you up before the Romanian police come on board, take your passport away to be stamped, then bring it back. The train then trundles a few metres over the border and the same process is repeated with the Moldovans, who also bring (drugs? firearms?) dogs on board and conduct customs checks. No one really speaks English, but the process is straightforward, polite and really quite fast. You can generally be ready to settle back down in just over an hour.

The most exciting part of the night is next to come, the gauge change between the Western European standard gauge and the broad gauge of the USSR. The old myth goes that the Russians used a different gauge to prevent invasions via train from the west, but this isn’t true and invading armies could just narrow the gauge manually if they were really determined. The truth is an American named George Washington Whistler recommended the Russian gauge track to the Tsar in 1842 on the basis of price and maintenance, and the track between Moscow and St. Petersburg was constructed accordingly, establishing the gauge across the empire and all subsequent iterations of it.

When the train reaches the border it is lifted up, carriage by carriage, 6 feet into the air and the bogies beneath the train are exchanged. This takes about an hour, consists of a lot of banging and shunting, but the sight of a huge train carriage being moved through the air in the dead of night is something unique and well worth experiencing.

I always sleep well on trains, and I found the Prietenia incredibly comfy and woke up just outside of Chisinau feeling well rested and ready to explore. The train brakes a lot in the night, it’s quite bumpy and you’re very aware you’re moving, but the continual rolling is comforting to me, and I enjoyed my night on board.

Overnight trains are romantic though, being taken somewhere at a leisurely pace, you don’t need to strap yourself in anywhere, and you can walk and go and look out of the window at any point you choose. The rammed 17:19 from Victoria to Reading, which costs almost as much as the ticket to Chisinau, is a million miles away from a meandering train on a hazy warm evening. Bucharest is a fast moving city, and as the train pulls away from the station you can feel yourself relax into the inevitably long journey. It takes 13 or so hours to get to Chisinau, and the old train is in no hurry to get there; there is only patchy wifi so your entertainment has to be delightfully analogue, conversation and observation, or perhaps that book hastily bought at an airport. Eastern Europe still has overnight train options, with western Europe catching up as people become more conscious of their travel footprint, and not all of them are as charming as the Prietenia, but should you find yourself sharing a bunk with a babushka you can almost guarantee she will look out for you like her own grandchild (if not slightly scoldingly when you prepare the bed incorrectly).

The train pulls into Chisinau, a nearly deserted station, where the departures to Lviv, Tiraspol, and Moscow are currently not operational and you simply step out into Moldova. Despite its reputation as a grey and desolate place I found the city to be cosy, welcoming and interesting, with a great craft beer scene emerging which I will tell you about in due course.