A FAIRYTALE TRAIN JOURNEY

FROM TRAVEL + LEISURE

TRAINS TAKE YOU behind the façade of a place and show you fleeting, random glimpses of ordinary life, sometimes beautiful, sometimes gritty. Travelling from Istanbul to Budapest on a luxurious private train called the Golden Eagle Danube Express in 2019, I looked out on storybook medieval villages and gloomy Communist housing blocks; smoke-stacked industrial suburbs and endless fields of sunflowers. Bystanders took videos of our cream-and-blue carriages, which were restored in the style of a glamorous fin de siècle sleeper train.

Sometimes the train’s throwback elegance made me feel like a visitor from another era; sometimes the scenery gave me a sense of travelling through another time. Once, somewhere in Romania, beside a highway humming with boxy Cold War-era Trabants and the latest German luxury cars, I glimpsed a man driving a horse cart down a dirt lane.

For four days, the train carried me and my 17 fellow passengers across a thousand miles, through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. And here’s what blew my mind: every scene we saw, every inch of railroad we clacked across, fell inside