Griff Rhys Jones: The romance of taking a train to the doily epicentre of Europe

I had decided on a trip to “Mitteleuropa” on “real journey” lines of extreme convenience. I wanted the romance of a train. The excitement of booking a day in Cologne. The mystery of a night sleeper across southern Germany and onward into Austria. Except that all the Eurostar trains were booked. Unless we wanted to sell the new car, there were no seats at our sort of prices. Then Mrs Jones discovered that she hadn’t searched early enough in the day. Bingo! There was a milk train at 6.13am. 

Even at 6.13am, the Eurostar was crowded. We walked from deserted urban emptiness into noisy chaos. It seems that every time I take this train it slips down a notch in sophistication, but at least we weren’t at an airport. This was a train. This was the essence of the authentic travel experience I wanted. 

Our carriage had an architect (black suede shoes and a roll-neck), a possible security official (black blouson and over-sensible shoes) an IT specialist (spots), a chap on his tablet (catching up on celebrities eating insects) and a female personal assistant (the only passenger with work to do). Who would get murdered first in this Christie novel? We were the only old couple, so it seemed likely to be us. Especially as we were probably the only passengers who didn’t have to be in Brussels by breakfast time. 

Somewhere over northern France a wet flannel of dawn finally absorbed the mist exhaling up from the fields. Low farms, barricaded behind square hedges, swept past. A line of fretted, Y-shaped pylons piqued my interest for a moment. It was the type of landscape you can only enjoy from a train: high enough to get some perspective, wide enough to get some grandeur, blank enough to feature nothing but the slow swell of the plains. 

An hour and a half at Brussels Midi gave me the chance for a proper in-depth exploration of a Belgian station shopping concourse: a lingerie shop, an extensive last-minute Belgian chocolate emporium, six outlets for crusty bread and some shoe shops. Then we joined a flurry of purposeful passers-by heading for platform 10a to board the ICE train. 

On board, the seat reservation signs – if that is what they were – were confusing. Some were blank. Some had gnomic legends on seat backs: “reserviert für Bahn comfort”. Mrs Jones’s seat was labelled “Bruxelles-K?ln”. I suggested that this probably meant what it said. She pointed out that nobody had sat in it yet. I pointed out that it may have meant people getting on in Bruxelles proper, not Midi. We moved seats. 

Mrs Jones then asked a passing uniformed man about some illuminated writing. “Do these mean reserved?” 

“Of course.” 

We moved again…

After leaving what was, I discovered on my phone, Liège, the landscape rose. We sped up hills and drove through cuttings. The map on a modern mobile phone is a boon. I could see the flat plains of northern France, traversed by sparse, thinly spread roads. Approaching the borders this became a thicket. We were entering the industrial territory over which Germany and France used to wage war. 

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The Excelsior Hotel was, we were assured, the best in Cologne. Better than that, it was right next door to the station. The Allies bombed this city relentlessly and I remembered ancient photographs showing Cologne cathedral emerging from a heap of rubble. That rubble is now a post-war commercial centre of curry-wurst and Hermès. We found our way to a first-floor restaurant for an indifferent lunch and an opportunity to show off my schoolboy German, acquired when I was 14 in nearby Wuppertal. 

It was Monday, so walking three times around the deserted Ludwig Museum and its prime collection of Picassos looking for an entrance door still didn’t get it to open, as this is the museums’ day of rest in Cologne. Relief came at the other end of the town, gazing on a yellow-brown expanse of the Rhine and watching the barge, Milano II, slug upstream through a beige dusk. We did this from the neatly designed panoramic café at the Museum of Chocolate, where the commercial imperative had overcome regular museum closing schedules.

That evening we took a taxi out to the suburbs and a small corner restaurant called L’Escalier, run with theatrical aplomb. It’s the sort of place that reminds you why those of us in our seventh decade of life spend half our holidays planning dinner. Three little amuse bouches arrived: canapés of brawn, salmon, kumquat. Then a cream of red onion with lamb ham and quince. Quail eggs appeared on a bed of herby lettuce on what looked like crispbread but was actually a layered sliver of parsnip. Hmm. 

We had another whole day in Cologne, investigating a slew of great, almost-empty museums. Possibly quiet because they resembled post offices, these were huge municipal warehouses of art. The Design Museum was not the haunt of old typewriters but of pots, sword handles, big wardrobes and carved angels. 

By six in the evening, we were fading. Our onward train didn’t arrive until 9.15pm and we were exhausted by too much art. We sat in the operatic gloom of the cathedral for a further half an hour. It was our second visit, but we had nowhere else to go. 

As I may have mentioned, the Excelsior Hotel is very close to the station. You don’t have to leave an hour in advance. It takes fewer than five minutes to roll your wheelies to the relevant platform – and you can even ask the hotel porter to fetch your case, then sit in the cosy bar with the piano player and wait until the last minute. I am not sure why we didn’t do that. We got the sudden panic that too much waiting about can bring on, and hurried across to the station far too early. 

Our sleeper train arrived at the platform stated on the ticket, at exactly the time promised. That evening we watched the shadowy, yellow-grey whale-backs of carriages in sidings and were then held by the dark snake of the Rhine. The pale golden contours of medieval churches in their modestly floodlit splendour rose above the yellow sodium beads of roads; castles gleamed on hilltops. 

We arrived the next morning in Vienna, far too early to get into our room at the Hotel K?rntnerhof. Instead we plunged straight into the streets of the cathedral district. I hankered after one of Vienna’s renowned coffee houses. There wasn’t one – or at least we couldn’t find one. I suggested to Mrs Jones that any un-renowned coffee would do, and so we ended up in a violently pink hellhole. 

Vienna is the doily epicentre of Europe. I had been put off going before, reading somewhere that it was a stiff, old-fashioned, slightly overbearing place. But it turns out that I crave that sort of thing. I loved the close tables and the delicate shops, the alleys, the unexpected architectural flourishes, the bourgeois comforts and the unhurried dignity of old Vienna. 

Mind you, the number of elderly people who had tarted themselves up for The Albertina art museum was frightening. We waited impatiently among the silvery hair to explore three floors of a modern art collection of staggering density and breadth, amassed over the years by Herbert Batliner and his wife Rita. It left me wondering whether Batliner, a lawyer, had charged his clients in pictures. The Leopold Museum is equally proud of itself. A show place for Egon Schiele, it has rather too many of Schiele’s overworked show-pony oil paintings and not enough of his masterpiece drawings. We had come to Vienna to explore secessionist zeal – to visit the hotbed of latent desire and frenzied repression, where Freud decided unrequited sex was the cause of neuroticism and Gustav Klimt behaved like an old satyr in hippy-land – but we were disappointed. Even the Klimts were now scarce, taken back by their original owners and replaced by large unimpressive photographs. 

Far better to track down Klimt and Schiele at the Belvedere. On an ugly, noisy walk up to the palace via Prinze-Eugen-Strasse, Mrs Jones consulted her electronic map. She wanted to use another entrance and walk through the garden. Once there, I was fervently, closely examining an unfinished masterpiece by the great surface-fiddler, Klimt, when a teacher led her class directly in front of me. I nearly had the attendants reprimanding me, I was that close. It became a squeeze for all of us. 

Meanwhile, the entrance to mumok, the city’s contemporary art museum, was as challenging as its exhibits. How do you access this blockhouse of uncompromising architectural rigidity? The top floors were taken up with contemporary concepts of man and nature; one floor down, there was a throw at “colonialism”, like a feeble stage-set for amateur theatricals, with potted plants and rattan chairs and a cage of parrots. After another couple of floors, we came across a crowded display of fading, random post-Sixties anti-art art. The whole place is do-able in 15 minutes flat. 

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I found the chocolate shop, Demel, easier to evaluate. Here was simple conceptual art: construct an installation that persuades the viewer to abandon objective judgment and indulge in over-eating. The Konditorei was daunting to visit in the middle of the afternoon, with a long queue just to get into the shop. Determined Chinese expedition leaders were urging squads of tourists into assaults on the back rooms. It wasn’t worth it. We bought a couple of boxes of biscuits in the showroom instead, but while Mrs Jones was paying I spotted two vacant seats at the bar and jumped on them.

I don’t eat cakes usually, so I thought I had better have five or six. I ordered two tiny wodges of strudel, two slivers of various confections and a mini Sachertorte. As I finished my coffee and fiddled with my phone, I became aware of the furious gaze of a man directly behind boring into my neck. I realised that he was attempting to unseat me with his hard, Austrian stare. I smiled and ordered another coffee.

The essentials

Getting there

Eurostar (eurostar.com) operates between St Pancras London-Brussels Midi, with fares from ￡58 return. 

Train journeys across much of Europe can be booked through Loco 2 (loco2.com).

Staying there

The Excelsior Hotel Ernst in Cologne offers double rooms from ￡146 per night.

Excelsior Hotel Ernst

Cologne, Germany

8Telegraph expert rating

This classic five-star hotel, located next to Cologne Cathedral and the city's main train station, has maintained high standards since 1863. Read expert review From ￡148per night Check availability Rates provided by Booking.com

Hotel K?rntnerhof (karntnerhof.com) in Vienna has double rooms from €139 (￡123).

Further information

• Cologne tourism: cologne-tourism.com

• Vienna tourism: wien.info/en

• Also see: germany.travel; austria.info/uk