Radio România Internațional

Tag: railroad

  • Seeing the world by train: accounts by Romanian travellers

    Seeing the world by train: accounts by Romanian travellers

    One of the greatest inventions of mankind is the railway, and the changes it brought about in modern world have been outstanding. Even after other means of transportation were discovered, railway remained the favourite way to travel for many, and, improved from one generation to the next, it still has a great future ahead of it.



    In Romania, railroads were first built after the union of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859 and entailed a radical change in the way the world was perceived. Romanians started to travel increasingly longer distances and to write about what they saw.



    Historian Radu Mârza is a professor with Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, and author of a book entitled “Romanian travellers looking out the train window: a tentative cultural history (1830-1930). We asked Radu Mârza what would Romanian travellers see out the train windows?



    “They would see lots of things. At first sight, they seem to be very interested in landscapes. But after I went through a lot of sources, I reached the conclusion that their primary interest is not so much the landscape, but the people. They look out the window at the people outside, the people in railway stations, and, not least, the people travelling alongside them on trains. They would take an interest in the places they visit, but the concept of a natural landscape, which was the starting point of my research, only catches the Romanian travellers attention later on, around the turn of the 20th century. For instance, A. D. Xenopol wrote beautiful pages about the Semmering railroad in Austria, or about his crossing the Alps by train. I could also mention Mihail Sadoveanu, who travelled to the Netherlands in the 1920s and was interested not so much in nature, but in the human presence: from the people working their gardens to the very modern image of the Dutch towns where railroads cross roads and canals. He was interested in the Dutch plants, electricity networks, railway stations.



    What railroads brought about was mobility: the movement of commodities, of businesses, and, above all, of people.



    “Mobility grew spectacularly compared to previous times and previous means of transportation. For example, the train journey from Bucharest to Karlsbad, Karlovy Vary in todays Czech Republic, would take around 72 hours in the 1920s, as compared to a week or two on the road in pre-railway times. So mobility simply exploded. And obviously this increased mobility helped people travel longer distances, more easily and comfortably. The railway car is at the same time a place of interaction and non-interaction. People can engage in a dialogue, in an interaction with their fellow passengers, but there are also travellers who are unwilling to interact, who just want to be left alone. Sadoveanu has a paragraph about how much he longed to be left alone, while the great novelist Liviu Rebreanu also tells us about the insistence with which another train passenger asked him to engage in conversation.



    But trains can also be dark places, places of crimes and even murder. We asked Radu Mârza whether Romanian travellers talk about this side as well:



    “I havent seen accounts of this kind, but I do remember a story by George Bariț, about a very interesting experience during his travels in Germany in 1852. He says in the Magdeburg railway station, where the train arrived at night, he was amazed to see 4 tracks going to 4 different directions, which was absolutely astonishing for him. And one of the funny things he noticed written on the walls of the station was a warning saying, ‘Beware of pickpockets!



    Railroads connected not only people, but also provinces, countries and continents. Radu Mârza told us that this connection was not only political in nature:



    “In the Old Kingdom of Romania, this was quite evident, and 19th Century travellers say that themselves. They understand that the railway is a means of connecting the country, not necessarily for political or sentimental reasons, but for the purpose of mobility and communication. And while in the West, in the beginning there were some reservations and criticism concerning trains, this was not the case in our part of the world. This is confirmed by the number of passengers, the number of tickets sold, which is quite relevant because it proves that from the very beginning the Romanian public welcomed train traveling with open arms.



    Romanians discovered the world from the train window and enjoyed it greatly. And the world, in turn, became smaller, more familiar, and more welcoming. (translated by: A.M. Popescu)

  • The Orient Express

    The Orient Express

    The 19th century has been labeled by several monikers, such as century of nations, or century of revolutions, but by the same token we can dub it century of railroads. The entire period is marked by a great enthusiasm that Europeans had for traveling by train, and as the railroad network widened, it became logical to have a pan-European route built. It was named the Orient Express, and it became a symbol of the potential for European unity.

    The story of the Orient Express starts with a sentimental drama lived by a young Belgian engineer, Georges Nagelmackers. He came from a wealthy family, and a deception in love sent him to the United States around the year 1867. While there, he had the opportunity to travel by Pullman carriages, sleeping carriages that were much more comfortable than what was found in Europe. In 1870 he returned to Belgium with a plan to build at home what he had seen in America. In 1883 he started the Orient Express project, quite unaware of what it was to become.

    The idea of a train that would cross all of Europe was instantly popular. Europe was seen as a so-called concert of nations, by which it was meant that each nation had its own specificity within a continental unity. Frances ambitions to civilize other places, and its modernizing assault upon the world, culminating with Napoleon I, changed the face of the continent forever. Dorin Stanescu is a historian of railroads, and we asked him if the Orient Express, besides being a train of social elites, was a symbolic unifier of the continent.

    “Obviously, because the Orient Express was a proposal to federalize Europe. Customs checks were greatly simplified, because customs agents got on board and ran the customs formalities while the train traveled, getting off at another station. The signing of international agreements tied to the building of the Orient Express railroad constituted a first step towards the European project. Practically, it was a borderless train.”

    The Orient Express line was definitely for the social elites, which was because at first it was unaffordable to anyone else. We asked Dorin Stanescu to talk about the passengers on that luxury train:

    “Once in a while, for short distances, this luxury train had attached to it 2nd and 3rd class carriages, which sometimes allowed middle class people to use it. However, both at first and for the duration of its existence, it is obvious that the Orient Express was for the elites. Paul Morand observed in 1914 that the passengers on the train formed a real cosmopolitan society. We are talking about business people, diplomats, princes, Free Masons, starlets, heads of secret services, spies, etc. You had as passengers rich Turks with their wives, Austrian aristocrats, Hungarian counts, Romanian boyars. Even the Romanian royal family traveled several times on the Orient Express. In fact, several European monarchs traveled on that train, including Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Franz Joseph, Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania, and the king of Bulgaria. It was full of celebrities. The reason regular people wanted to be on this train was because they could listen to the stories of the elites, which turned traveling on the Orient Express into a mythical journey.”

    On the territory of what is now Romania, the train came from the west, and departed by two routes from Bucharest, towards the east and the south. Dorin Stanescu spoke about the contribution of the train to the modernization of railroad infrastructure on Romanian territories:

    “In 1883, when the story of the Orient Express starts in this area, the train came in through Varciorova, in the west, continued by Turnu Severin, then Craiova, Slatina, Pitesti, and got to Bucharest. From there it went towards Giurgiu, in the south, through the port of Smarda, then it crossed the Danube going to Varna. From Varna it continued by steam ship and reached Constantinople. This train had a great contribution to the construction of railroads. Major railroad segments and infrastructure were built during this time. The famous Cernavoda bridge designed by Anghel Saligny had an important role to play in the concept of the Orient Express. At some point, the train went over this bridge going between Bucharest and Constanta. From Constanta, ships of the Romanian Maritime Service carried travelers to Constantinople. Therefore traveling over Romanian territories is a very interesting part of the story of the Orient Express. Many times, the Romanian and international press reported on stops in Bucharest, especially when the royal family was traveling to their mountain estates at Sinaia, at Peles Castle. The hospitality of the royal family at that time was a major image builder for Romania, in its wish to modernize, and granted prestige to the family within Europe.”

    WWI was the event that put a stop to the Orient Express for the first time. It resumed running in 1921. WWII had an even greater impact, because the destruction was more widespread. The installation of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a great hindrance in the life of the line. In 1977, due to competition from airlines, the train stopped running once again. However, in 2016, the Orient Express was reborn as a renewed symbol of European unity, as a tradition that must be preserved.