Hotel Chopin Paris

On track for a rainy Czech diversion

EASTERN EXPRESS BERLIN - PRAGUE:  The train from Berlin to Prague leads to a city much changed from the description found in a battered 1970s copy of ‘Let’s Go: Europe’, in the second part of a series exploring Europe by rail, writes RUADHAN Mac CORMAIC  

‘I KNOW EXACTLY the place to go,” wrote a friend in Berlin when I sent word of my stopover. A short walk from the Hauptbahnhof (the central railway station), in an isolated half-timbered building next to the sandy vastness of the site where Germany’s new interior ministry is due to be built, stands Paris-Moskau. Built at the end of the 19th century, the tavern – now a fine restaurant – was one of the few buildings in the area to survive the 1945 battle for the nearby Reichstag intact. Its location made it a crossroads between east and west, and it did a brisk trade with long-distance lorry drivers and east Berliners until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 hit business and tipped it into decline.

It got its current name, a reference to the 120-year-old railway link between the French and Russian capitals and Berlin’s place between them, in 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms were starting to prise open the Soviet Union. The staff concocted their own special cocktail and called it Glasnost. Today, in a sign of how Europe’s imagery of Russia has evolved in the intervening years, the signature cocktail is called the Gazprom, after the energy megafirm.

The direct rail link between Paris and Moscow still exists (albeit with a 10-hour stopover in Berlin), but I opted for a more circuitous route, heading south to Prague, across the Czech Republic and north to Warsaw.

Over lunch in the dining car, en route to Prague, Patrick Miller from Pennsylvania produces a small rock from his pocket, places it on the table and tells me it’s a memento from one of the highlights of his trip so far. It’s nondescript; I admire it. He explains that he picked it up on the Normandy beaches as a gift for one of his neighbours – another military nut – back home.

“I’d been watching the military channel,” he explains.

“Again,” adds his wife, Janet, with mock exasperation. “I get to fit in my fun stuff every so often, but mostly it’s military.”

Patrick and Janet – amiable and laid-back – are on a two-week train trip, taking in parts of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic. They don’t have much of a plan, being simply content to enjoy the rare thrill of travelling everywhere by train. “We wake up and say, ‘okay, where do you want to go today’,” Janet says.

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