You think British trains are bad? Try German ones

I found Jean-Pierre standing at a half-open window gulping down lungfuls of stale Dutch air as our night train chuntered, unseeing, through an expectoration of towns: Zutphen, Eefde, Gorssell. He was 79 years old, he told me, and returning to Berlin for the first time in 61 years for a meeting with an old friend.

Back in 1962, Jean-Pierre had been a very young Belgian Jesuit employed in smuggling hard currency from West to East Berlin, which he did by stuffing the notes inside a plaster cast which covered his right leg. There was nothing wrong with his leg, of course. His contact in an illegal Christian charity in the East was a man of the same age, called Norbert – and it was this chap he was going to see for the first time in almost six decades.

They had lost touch with one another in the mid-1960s, but Jean-Pierre had embarked upon a kind of demented scouring of social media sites recently and found, to his delight, that his former comrade was alive. His excitement was palpable and touching; he had scarcely believed that such a re-union could be possible. I asked him if Norbert was happy in the new(ish) Germany. He told me that his old friend was a little ambivalent. ‘He said that in the old days we had no money, but we understood what was important in life. For many, that understanding has now gone. But… they are rich.’

By an uncanny coincidence, the carriage in which we were travelling first saw service in 1962. Really. This was part of the much-heralded new European sleeper service from Brussels to Berlin which began running in May this year.