My Waterloo

Train travel is all the rage. New/revived sleeper services are springing to life across the continent. There are new glacier train services in Switzerland/Northern Italy. I have my eye on quite a few train trips. It would be madness not to give them a go. As a railwayman,I get fantastic discounts on rail travel across most of the continent. It’s free in several countries. And yet. I’ve never been on Eurostar. I have been through the channel tunnel once, but that was aboard a coach. Doesn’t count. So I kicked off 2024 with a trip to Brussels. It’s the only one of the three direct destinations that I haven’t been to. I haven’t been to Belgium, full stop. So off I went.

Train travel isn’t without it’s risks though. It can all go a bit Pete Tong very quickly. My trip nearly fell by the wayside when it came to buying a ticket at St Pancras- a wild cat strike in France shut the tunnel, clogged the terminal and the ticket offices were closed. Happily, I managed to get the attention of one member of staff, explain my predicament and discretely book my journey. It also nearly went wrong trying to reach the outbound leg, the 09:01 from London. A 20 metre stretch of buckled rail blocked the line to the capital, and stopped the train needed to reach London in time. Happily, I wasn’t so daft as to trust the rail service with such a tight schedule and went up the night before. And if I’d come back a day earlier, I’d again have been stranded due to flooding.

I dodged all these bullets. But I did, inevitably, meet my Waterloo. I had hoped to visit the battlefield, made famous by Christopher Plummer and Rod Steiger in the Italian/Soviet Union film of the same name. But it rained. Continuously. At times it eased off to a mere torrential downpour. But otherwise, it was more ‘biblical monsoon’. I decided against the 30 minute walk required to get from train station to the historic site. I did something else instead. A church. A trip to Ghent. I ate some mussels, which were very nice. And a weird fried meal which was less so. I saw a painting called the Lamb of God, about which they make a huge fuss. And I repeatedly cursed the god awful weather.

Brussels generally gets a bad rap. Indeed, whilst Belgium certainly has it’s bright spots, it’s not a highlight of Europe. Over the centuries many famous, and terrible, battles have been fought here. Passcendale, the Bulge, Mons. But I couldn’t help but note, as I surveyed the desolate, grey, rain drenched city and countryside, that they certainly weren’t fought for here. Not for possession of Belgium. Indeed, I suspect that if the rules of war included the line ‘And the winner must occupy and base themselves in Belgium’, there might just be less war. Wellington would likely have jogged on. And Napoleon would likely have surrendered faster than as quickly as a Frenchman.