Of Stations Passed
[Luc Devoldere]

As the train approaching on the high embankment rounds the broad bend towards the station, walls with cone-shaped turrets appear to left and right of the tracks. The approach to a very special railway monument unfurls. The walls separate the tracks - the ‘iron road’ - from the street that runs along below the railway, where ringleted Jews with flapping coats cycle past without a glance. At the other window, the strange world we call the zoo beckons briefly from behind a high wall as the steel and glass dome engulfs the train as if it were a foetus returning to the womb.

Antwerp Central. This Cathedral of the Tracks, which opened in 1905, with its imposing dome of 15 arched trusses which gloriously defied two flying bombs in 1945, was nearly demolished in the 1970s. But as a listed monument, the neobaroque building underwent thorough restoration between 1986 and 1996. Nowadays the traveller arrives in a building site again, because the station is being adapted to meet the requirements of the High Speed Train that will link Paris and Amsterdam via Brussels. The trench that will bring the fast train under the station is finished apart from the roof, and the planned North-South link should be able to deal with the increasing rail traffic by 2005. Then the historic terminus should be able to take its place once more, unscarred, in modern rail traffic, with tracks that pass underground and only re-emerge a good kilometre further on.

In the meantime, the traveller can still descend the majestic stairs into the huge hall and look up at the dome far above, which is reminiscent of the Pantheon in Rome. In this hall, which was designed to lift the two moments of travel - arrival and departure - out of banality and give them a certain style, overflowing kiosks and rows of glass telephone booths now compete with each other in ugliness, a blight on the space. You hope for a Galilean to chase the merchants from the temple. But they are tolerated like the gold shops on the outside of the station in Pelikaanstraat, which are controlled by the Georgian or some other mafia.

Despite everything, though, the building is grand, and the inscription ‘L'union fait la force’ (Belgium's motto: ‘Strength lies in Unity’) stands guard over it beside other, now redundant, inscriptions in the facade like ‘Telegraaf’, ‘Telephoon’, ‘Posterijen’, ‘Spaar en Lijfrentekas’ (Telegraph, Telephone, Post Office and the name of a national savings bank). The restoration of the building is excellent, but all the signs, TV screens and inscriptions added by the Belgian National Railway Company clash horribly with the nineteenth-century grandeur that dates from a time before travelling meant movement on a massive scale. The clash is less obvious in the magnificent station buffet, which has been just as excellently restored. Three balloons, let loose by thoughtless children's hands and then forgotten, have retreated to the huge caissons of the ceiling. But here, too, the new furnishings lose the unequal battle with the grand space, dominated by a huge clock that reminds the traveller that sooner or later inexorable time will drive him away from here. He is only ever a passer-through, too lowly for this palace.

La Constitution tangible

The first train in continental Europe steamed from Groendreef in Brussels to Mechelen, on 5 May 1835. Pulled by three locomotives, the convoy with 900 passengers did the twenty-two kilometres in only fifty minutes. On the return trip the single locomotive that was pulling thirty carriages had problems, having taken on too much water. The company that had braved the new vehicle's breath-taking speed was cordially invited to step out in the middle of the fields. There was no station available yet; half a century later that had changed.

By 1880 Belgium had become a prosperous country with the most liberal constitution in the world and the most beautiful railways in Europe. Charles Rogier, the Prime Minister, referred to them as ‘la constitution tangible’ (‘Our tangible constitution’).

The train brought with it modernity, industrialisation and factories. Thanks to the first train that steamed into Aalst on 6 July 1856, a sleepy little provincial town would metamorphose, in the space of a few years, into a thriving manufacturing centre. Progress arrived on the railways, but so too did the oppression of workers and social conflict. Stations were the preserve of the middle classes. They were an expression of what was phrased as follows in a report from the young French Republic: ‘A public monument is, so to speak, the condensed drama of a great event. Under despotism, the people did not count, nowadays they are what they should be, in other words everything. Public monuments should remind them of their courage, their triumphs, their rights, their dignity, they should speak a language that is intelligible to everyone.’1. Monuments were intelligible to everyone, but particularly to the middle classes, who had emerged from the Revolution as victors. Aalst station looks like a pseudo-medieval castle, complete with towers and battlements.

Stations in turn brought squares, districts full of cafés, restaurants, hotels and brothels, publicity and anonymity, the rituals of flight and return. Their heyday, like that of the middle classes, lasted until 1914. But since then they have come under pressure. Some of them, like Ghent South and the North and South Stations in Brussels, have disappeared, victims of the practical problems increasingly posed by mass mobility. Terminal stations in particular, as ‘culs-de-sac’, had difficulties. Though the terminal, after all, is the archetypal station. The train stops there once and for all, it opens onto a square, and the city swallows up the traveller.

Antwerp survived and accepted an honourable compromise, but the reality is rarely as generous. Stations are no longer monumental gates to the world but, increasingly, emporia of mobility and consumption. Utrecht's Central Station is part of an enormous shopping centre for which the old station area was demolished.

Heads of State used to arrive at the original Brussels North Station (1846). Today the present, 1950s, station stands dejectedly in a barren area, where skyscrapers try to look like a metropolis. The terminus has made way for the North-South link. If you know today's Place Rogier, to see an old photo of it is astonishing. Many small stations also ran into difficulties and were closed through lack of use and profitability. Windows were bricked up. Occasionally they were saved by being converted into cafés. Sometimes the track was raised and the old station below was abandoned, sidelined, to its fate.

Down at the station, early in the morning

I collect stations and their trappings.

There are stations where no-one ever gets out and stations that flash past because no trains stop there any more.

And there are the stations that have been taken down piece by piece and reconstructed a hundred miles away. In Ronse you can see the station that stood

in Bruges from 1844 to 1879 - it is supposed to be the oldest in Europe. Though it is said to be the wrong way around, with its front alongside the track. And then there are the stations that have disappeared, which we can only see in photos.

There are characterless commuter stations like Denderleeuw, where I take the train to Brussels. A railway village that has grown up around the train and where people only come to sleep; a collection of houses that refuse to become a suburb of the capital and continue to turn their backs on it. Now car trains leave from there on their way to destinations in the Mediterranean (which explains why, to my surprise, I saw the name ‘Denderleeuw’ amongst the international destinations at Milan station, as if it were Paris or Berlin).

There are stations with poems on the wall, too. Verses written by poets who, sitting stranded on their suitcases on their way through, are suddenly visited by a vision of the ‘Spirit of Poetry’ (Guido Gezelle) or the epiphany of the plastic bag on the head of a man braving the rain (Jozef Deleu). They are put up there piously, years later, after many letters addressed to shadowy railway authorities. The mayor of the village, who never reads a line of verse, glows at the unveiling. The stationmaster, with his smartest cap on, is there to represent the National Railway Company. And then everything - poet's fame, communal glory and railway pride - gets washed down in the café At the Iron Road on the station square.

The archetypal little station is in De Haan aan Zee and it is a tram station. This listed jewel from 1902 wavers between being a cottage and an equally archetypal station as painted by Paul Delvaux. Right between the tracks there is a touching art nouveau cast-iron post with the sign ‘Keep off the railway’.

Then there are the trappings: waiting rooms with the disquieting sign, put on the wall by an artist, ‘What are you waiting here for?’; waiting rooms like windy passageways where people look straight through each other; station buffets which sometimes resemble sumptuous boudoirs and sometimes depressing village cafés (yet hopeless romances, like the one in David Lean's Brief Encounter, can develop here - adultery between two coffees and two trains).

There are station squares with French fries stand, telephone booth, a miserable bicycle rack and the inevitable Estaminette de Statie (Station Pub).

There are platforms, like the one in Rouen, where the Flemish poet Emile Verhaeren got run over by a train, or the one Anna Karenina stepped off from.

There are the underground passages, long ones which never end, where cyclists race past you suddenly, with a newsstand that gets packed up at 8.00 in the morning and a girl hemmed in by rows of sweets.

And graffiti - pointless messages that Kilroy or Tito or Elvis ‘was here’, or the line that sticks in your mind, ‘and the further he went the longer was his journey back’ (from C.S. Crone, on a house outside Utrecht Central).

Along with all of that there is the backdrop of station music that numbs the soul like camphor. Dutch Railways has a plan to chase away the junkies who hang round their stations with... classical music. It seems that experiments in Hamburg have demonstrated that it works. Honi soit qui mal y pense. But station music fades into oblivion compared to the nursery rhyme that roars through my head now: it captures the classic ingredients of the railways and evokes the cheerful urge to get away from it all associated with the mythical train.

And then there is still the unforgettable and laconic:

Second class return

Going in search of stations, I decide to take a train at random.

Surprise me, Belgian Railways.

Ghent-Adinkerke/De Panne

Veurne was opened up by the railway in 1858. The station dates from 1895. The architect Wisselaar, from Bruges, knew his neo-Gothic. The central part of the station was inspired by the Spanish pavilion on the little town's market square. The corner tower looks like a medieval belfry and the entrance hall has a cross vault: the station as church. Not more than a kilometre from this neo-gothic edifice is Koksijde station (on Veurne soil!). It is the only station I know where the pavement café has a brick barbecue. Nothing about the white-washed building with the flat roof betrays the fact that in World War II it was a German bunker, close to Koksijde airfield. The station, which is the property of the borough of Koksijde, is not where one might assume it would be. Unsuspecting visitors to the seaside get out expecting to see the sea just around the corner. Instead of that it lies mockingly five kilometres away. The station has only one track and a large car park that turns imperceptibly into a platform. This station, which is still for many the gateway to the summer holidays, gets my prize for cosiness.

But let's take another train.

Cologne-Ostend

Past Bruges the train runs through the flat polder with a clear, wind-blown sky above it. As far as the eye can see are straight lines of trees, bowed by the wind. After the cranes boats glide past, the shipping channel heralds the sea. Here at the continental terminal the jolting of a carriage from Moscow connects seamlessly to the rolling of a boat to England. Between 1929 and 1939 one could leave London on a luxury Pullman at 10.00, arrive in Ostend at 16.32, and reach Cologne at 21.50. But the boat to England does not exist any more. The Channel Tunnel has overtaken Ostend for speed. Coming out of the station in Ostend, one sees a forest of masts and above them the imposing profile of the Mercator, the former training ship of the Belgian Navy. The station was officially opened in 1913, at the height of the Belle Epoque, when Ostend was a sophisticated international seaside resort. One of its two domes was destroyed in 1914 and never restored. These days the waiting room is no more than a passage between the platforms and the entrance hall and is stuffed with the obligatory drink and sweet automats. But the entrance hall itself, with no seats, makes up for a lot and the green painted, square buffet with its high caisson ceiling with gilded ornamentation is a relief. Light comes in through high windows and shines on the bar which, alas, clashes again.

 

Brussels Central-Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve

The train creeps along under the ground, past Brussels Congress (with a column above it where a flame burns for the Unknown Soldier); Brussels North (a station with two faces and two exits, one giving onto glass and steel, a windblown emptiness that tries to look like Manhattan, and a grimy one on the rue Aarschot, where girls recline behind their lighted windows and watch for the train from Amsterdam. A huge, dilapidated stone angel keeps watch with widespread wings above this street where love always costs too much (before) or too little (afterwards) - or is it, after all, the other way round?

Then there is Brussels Schuman, where only civil servants get out to bury over-ground Europe under reports and communiqués; then the new Brussels Luxembourg Station which leads to the European Parliament. I get out to see what is left of the old station: only a wall now, a scaenae frons, a theatre wall, behind which the mammoth European Parliament (Caprice de Dieu) sticks out. The windows have been painted over in an attempt to make this pointless facade look airy; the hands of the clock still show time passing, but here it has stopped irrevocably and for ever. Despite the building excavations, the gypsy woman, sitting with downcast eyes and upturned palm, begs. On the station square, that can still cheer up the stripped station wall, stands the statue of John Cockerill (1790-1840). Travail graces the plinth. Taxis queue around it. You can just see still that Le Cerf once had Chambres-Confort-Pension, Rooms-Comfort-Bed and Breakfast.

I escape back into the train.

Etterbeek. The little station is overwhelmed by a mass of glass behind it: City Group. Watermaal-Watermael. Bosvoorde-Boitsfort (or how Flemish place names acquire a new life in French). Between Bosvoorde and Groenendaal the train goes through the green tunnel of what was once the magnificent Kolenwoud (Silva Carbonara) between the Rhine and the North Sea, the Zoniënwoud, or Forêt de Soignes. To left and right swells, rises and falls the forest where Ruusbroeck sought God. But just before Groenendaal the Brussels Ring reminds the traveller that in this part of Europe forests have been replaced, once and for all, by ‘a patch of wood no bigger than your hand’ (J.C. Bloem, transl. James Brockway). In Groenendaal I find only the art nouveau ceiling of what must once have been a beautiful station (1896). Leopold II is said to have been directly involved in the design. Indeed, the racecourse where he was a regular visitor was barely a kilometre away. This is still the ideal stop for a walk in the woods. The station is a protected monument, but Belgian Railways has no money to do up the burned-out outbuilding. Not for the last time I am surprised at the ugliness of the Belgian Railways' furnishings: pathetic, clashing signs and seats. Now I am certain of it: until 1914 people believed in the railways, the train was the king of mobility for the middle classes. No money was spared to give them waiting rooms, station concourses and train

coupés befitting their position in life (even if there was a second, third and even fourth class). The train was simply a faster coach. Now the king has been deposed.

The station where Verlaine got out

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something you have never known? I am nostalgic for Ghent South Station. I am nostalgic for the trains that puffed to a stop in the heart of the city, a stone's throw from the three towers. Coming out of the station, people saw a typical station area with cafés, restaurants, cinemas and brothels - the hustle and bustle, and the expectation of departure and arrival. I have never actually seen the station. When I started to visit the district in the




1980s, it had long since been demolished and replaced by a park, and entry and exit slip roads that spew their cars along it. What I have seen is the systematic dismantling of the area. It began with a hotel, whose windows were boarded up. Later they were suddenly open again, and later still there were trees growing through them. An art nouveau hall that was condemned to death was called the Coliseum, but that couldn't save it. Then along came the cheerful bulldozers, the patient cranes, the construction workers who peacefully occupy squares and pavements - nomads passing through, who stay for a while in barracks. One cinema was allowed to keep its facade and pediment, but the other disappeared into the oblivion of a huge hole - after the usual loss of its film programme, which ended, as always, with busty films from the Tyrol. I witnessed the patient siege of the cafés (in the end one was left, dilapidated and rickety between the cranes and the excavations). I saw the auction of the contents of the Park Hotel (in whose huge lobby I spent many hours, safely surrounded by old ladies who spoke bad French and always kept their hats on, while I waited for the woman who was to become my wife), and the levelling with a bang of the bad Italian restaurant where she ate her first pizza. By that time the kitchen and the square had long since lost all meaning, because the station had gone and no travellers had dropped in for years. Even the prostitutes at Ghent South looked more tired than elsewhere.

The station square is now a windy space with unsuccessful Bofill and packet boat architecture. ‘Sous le pavé ce n'est pas la plage mais le parking’, it's not the beach under the paving stones, but the car park, it is so close to the surface that no trees can grow here. The socialist leader Anseele still points in scrawny social-realism to a never discovered workers' paradise that apparently lies in the direction of the motorway, and a frieze that could just as well be Hitler's as Stalin's (and is therefore also ‘social-realistic’) was resurrected out of misguided piety and incorporated into the glass and steel packet boat. Go and look at it, it's awful.

There has been resistance, though. Sometimes it seems as if time - or sections of it - stands stubbornly still. Just a few steps from the now non-existent house where Maeterlinck used to live in the Frère Orbanlaan, there is a magnificent town house with an entrance gate. A copper plate states that a lawyer called... Maeterlinck lives there. Opposite there is a house where for a long time a copper plate bearing the name of a tax consultant defaced the inscription, which is now legible again: ici est né Charles Van Lerberghe poète. It had been hoped that boutiques would be established here in the restored ‘glass street’. Instead, however, ladies of easy morals have taken it over, as if the disorientated travellers pour out of the station again, as if those who are off to Isfahan want to fill in the time while they wait for the train. In the evenings the monumental back wall of the arts centre, Vooruit, is lit up. Above the stage inside this old socialist temple of culture, that bathes in the weary Scheldt, we can read ‘Kunst veredelt’ (art ennobles), hieroglyphs from a world that believed in advancement through emancipation. I turn round and on the other side of the square I see the municipal library where, richly provided with books and newspapers, you can eat and drink and complain enjoyably about everything that has disappeared. The loss of a part of the city is absolute, but evidently one can live with it. Nostalgia can add colour to the trivial, absence can validate ugliness. In the meantime there is hustle and bustle again on the windy space, skateboards clatter over the concrete. The loss of a landscape is only absolute for those who have known it. Blinded by absence, they don't see what grows wildly and senselessly in its place. In the park, between the motorway entry and exit roads - where the tracks used to fan out - a pupil from the boys' school glides slowly into one from the girls' school. This patch of wood may be no bigger than your hand, but for those who go there for the first time it is a jungle. Perhaps where they touch is the exact spot where Verlaine once got out of the train, right there where Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles van Lerberghe and Grégoire Le Roy stood waiting for him. The three old school friends had persuaded the Cercle artistique et littéraire to invite the great poet. ‘The train from Brussels stops in the almost deserted station. One of the windows in third class opens noisily and frames the faun-like head of the old poet, who shouts to us, “I take it with sugar.” Apparently that was his customary greeting when he travelled, a sort of war cry or password, which meant that he sweetened his absinthe with sugar.’ (Maurice Maeterlinck, Bulles bleues). Trying to get Verlaine to the lecture more or less sober proves a nightmare for the young literati. After the meeting, at which the slightly tipsy Verlaine acquits himself ‘fairly honourably’, for the rest of the night it's just a matter of preventing him from getting completely drunk and buying drinks for every passer-by. Le Roy, ‘an inveterate noctambulist’, is given the job. Next morning he delivers the staggering Lélian back to the station. Perhaps a commemorative plaque should be put up in the park with the words: Paul Verlaine, who took it with sugar, got off the train here.

‘It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry’ (Bob Dylan)

The traveller on platform one at Brussels Central takes the slow train to his village, thirty kilometres and twelve stops away. He gets out, a nobody, at the station in the village where he lives. Is he at home here or stranded? The Orient Express of his dreams has turned into a suburban train full of exhausted commuters. There is a tarmac platform, a shelter with broken windows, an empty car park. And there is his trusty bicycle. The train disappears into the night.

Translated by Lindsay Edwards