Boarding a sleeper train instantly transports you to another world – turning the start of your holiday into a magical journey, writes Jo Tinsley

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels enthralled by miniature worlds, from toy train sets to flea circuses to snow domes. Dollhouse food particularly gets me – it’s those tiny baguettes dusted in flour, minute trays of poached salmon in aspic, neat larders stacked with jars of peaches and preserved lemons.

Model villages too, with their trimmed privet hedges, neat allotments and mechanical windmills. I think it’s partly the bewildering shift in time; the fact that it’s always a Sunday morning – tiny parishioners gathering after a church service, while a minuscule game of cricket is played out in perpetuity on a manicured village green. And then there’s that hall-of-mirrors moment when you spot a model village within a model village.

To me, these make-believe worlds within worlds represent a place out of time, one with a promise of stepping outside our everyday life and into a space with different rules, different ways of being. I feel a similar sense of transcendence when stepping aboard a sleeper train.

You might find that a stretch of the imagination, but it’s the playful change of scale when you leave the platform – with its vast vaulted ceilings, oversized statues and giant railway clocks – and, via a series of shrinking doors, enter a world of tiny sinks and secret reading lights, teeny toothbrushes and dinky storage pockets. Everything having a place, everything within reach. For me, this Lilliputian change in scale creates a sense of being transported to another world. This is a place where wondrous things can happen.

The Twilight Express

One journey that particularly piqued my sense of wonder was an 18-hour trip aboard the Norrlandståget sleeper in northern Norway. After spending a week visiting relatives in Tromsø, my partner and I were ready to move onto the next stage of our two-city trip: Stockholm, some 630 miles (1,014km) to the south.

Tromsø’s latitude of 69°N means that for two glorious months in the summer there are no dark nights – the midnight sun bounces off the horizon, illuminating the twin-island city and surrounding fjords with 24 hours of daylight.

However, we were leaving the “Arctic Capital” in late November, on the cusp of the Polar night. After today, the sun would not appear until the end of January, meaning much of our journey south would be conducted in twilight.

After a four-hour bus from Tromsø to Narvik, we boarded the Norrlandståget – a brute of an engine which appears to plough through snow and ice like a real-life Snowpiercer.

The initial 82-mile (133km) stretch of line between Narvik and Kiruna (Sweden) is Norway’s most northerly railway, built at the end of the 19th century to transport iron ore (previously hauled over the mountains by reindeer-drawn sled) from northern Sweden to the ice-free Norwegian coast so it can be shipped overseas. Known as the Ofotbanen or Ofoten Line, it crosses Norway in an hour, travelling high above the Rombaksfjord through wild, uninhabited terrain.

We bundled on board with our backpacks and a just-in-case picnic tea my mother’s cousin had foisted upon us – a Nordic feast of foil-wrapped smoked salmon rolls, boiled eggs, skyr yogurt, knekkebrød (crispbread) and slices of brunost, a brown-coloured, cheesy food with a firm yet fudgy texture and a distinctive – though strangely hard to convey – savoury-nutty-caramel flavour. I’ve heard it called “salty goat’s fudge”, which is certainly one way to describe it.

Luggage stowed, we settled into our snug second-class compartment with its three-up bunks, the view through the curved cabin window a blur of ice-streaked birch, lichen-draped boulders and the occasional neat red-painted station. We soon discovered wide windows on the other side of the corridor that revealed a more expansive vista over a pewter-coloured fjord with billowing snowy peaks in the far distance.

This is an extract from a longer piece in Idler 91: July/August 2023.

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