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Join Which? TravelI took the night Riviera train to Cornwall — here’s my honest review
Magical voyage or logistical nightmare?
Once upon a time, a great family of sleeper trains roved Britain after dark.
Just a few decades ago, passengers could doze their way between the Tyne and the Thames, snooze from London to Irish Sea ports – even bed down on a carriage bound for the continent to be shunted onto a Channel Ferry in the small hours.
The clank of the midnight rails was the signature of the sleeper – a near-mythical beast – swooping past with sleeping souls in its care. One by one, these routes succumbed to the axe (sleepers are expensive to run, as well as being useless during the daytime hours).
Today, only two remain: the increasingly glitzy Caledonian Sleeper to Scotland and the more humble Paddington-Penzance service I’m about to board, the Night Riviera.
The train’s poetic name seems to evoke the ocean wind in moonlit palms. Here, you can still savour a beautiful, bygone mode of travel, catching 40 winks between the capital and farthest extremity of England.
The first thing to say about the Night Riviera is that it’s a wonder anyone is able to book a ticket. Booking online involves navigating some baffling drop-down menus – you add your sleeper compartment as an optional extra, in the same way you might add a panini or extra legroom on a Ryanair flight.
I find my train waiting on Paddington’s Platform 1, skulking among the wheelie bins. Those harbouring Agatha Christie fantasies should return to ITV3 reruns, for the Night Riviera experience is, above all, businesslike and brisk.
The train leaves London just after pub closing time, arriving in Penzance eight short hours later, shortly before the morning school run. There’s no dining car, just a basic bar car reminiscent of a student union. Nor are there top-hatted porters, but rather attendants in hi-vis with clipboards and an air of kindly confusion to usher you to your compartment (and kick you out at the other end).
Stepping aboard, I find that my quarters are comfortable – fully refurbished in 2018 – but far from extravagant. There’s a narrow bed, a sink and a wardrobe big enough for a single coathanger. But it’s as the train begins to creak forth that the magic of this antique contraption starts to take hold.
The rusty glow of the night-time city turns to murky Wiltshire wheatfields. There’s the chorus of the train to lull you to sleep: the staccato rhythm of the rails, the snoring of fellow passengers through walls as thin as Weetabix. All the while, you inhabit a little pocket of domesticity, borne across moonlit farmland and sleeping market towns.
The Night Riviera is not a train for sightseeing. Go for a small hours’ trip to the shared facilities and you might spy Glastonbury Tor. Wake at four and you might watch a rosy dawn breaking over the beach at Dawlish.
There’s the bar/lounge where you can enjoy Cornish beers or a few biscuits, but to do so would be to spoil the particular wizardry of the sleeper. This means closing your curtains on the hubbub of Paddington and only opening them again at Penzance, to the silhouette of St Michael’s Mount and a mob of seagulls waiting to swoop down on your complimentary breakfast (pastry, bacon sarnie or porridge).
Passengers instinctively head for the free showers at Penzance station. Instead, I walk 10 minutes along the seafront to the Penzance Jubilee Pool – a 1930s Art Deco lido – where whitewashed walls frame a blue Atlantic sky, and the saltwater feels like a baptism after the capital scrum (admission £7; jubileepool.co.uk)
Despite minor faults, the Night Riviera is a magnificent shortcut to the south-west, saving on the cost of a hotel room. It also offers a chance to connect Cornwall’s own rail network, which is small, rickety and yet sublime.
Branching out
The sleeper travels the Cornish mainline, but forking off it are a handful of branch lines – slow routes that dawdle down to the sea, and offer a compelling (albeit not definitive) impression of the county without any need for a car.
The smallest of these branches is the St Ives Bay Line. It takes just over 10 minutes to run between the junction of St Erth (near Penzance) and the artists’ colony of St Ives, where the light is famously radiant, and where the platform is always strewn with beach sand.
I step aboard a two-carriage train and find it is indeed a ride of rare and rapturous beauty – the line first tracing a wide estuary noisy with honking geese, then clinging to foxglove-crested precipices as waves break in the coves down below. This is also a staggeringly popular trip.
St Ives is a place where parking spaces have been extinct in the wild for decades, so the train functions as a de-facto park and ride, with families lugging beach apparatus making a dash for the seafacing seats.
As a passenger squidged on board, it takes effort to avoid getting hooked on a crabbing line. Upon arrival in St Ives, the opening of the carriage doors is akin to the releasing of the bulls at Pamplona, with waves of tourists bolting forth into narrow streets. St Ives is absurdly beautiful – but in peak season, it can be miserably crowded.
There’s a grim irony in looking around its many galleries, admiring watercolours that always depict the streets without a soul in sight. Penryn and Pendennis I much prefer the Maritime Line, which runs south of the mainline at the cathedral city of Truro.
Tourists here are scarcer; instead, students and commuters make up the passenger cohort. This is a ride of more subtle beauty, the train clanking over viaducts and puttering along river valleys, passing request stops where it can be halted by a hopefully outstretched hand.
At Penryn station, I disembark to visit the Verdant Taproom just outside the station to try local beers (verdantbrewing.co). At Falmouth Town station, I wander the streets of a port that wears its tourism industry far more lightly than St Ives.
The line terminates at Falmouth Docks, where Pendennis Castle looms over the platform – the great bastion defending this English harbour from Tudor times until the Second World War, its motley arsenal still pointed at the seas from which invaders never came. I buy a ticket and get lost among its array of turrets and tunnels. In this, and other places, Cornish branch lines unlock places of saltwater, silence and rust (admission £17; english-heritage.org.uk).
To ride the Cornish rail network requires patience. ‘We are sorry to announce…’ is the mantra of the station announcer: delays and cancellations are the norm on my visit, with lengthy connections entailing hours of platform-based thumb-twiddling.
You could travel from London to Paris by Eurostar in the time it took me to get from Falmouth to Newquay on the opposite shore of Cornwall. Here, the Atlantic Coast Line from Par trundles through the county’s industrial heartland, passing the tramlines of the Luxulyan Valley and the china clay pits around Bugle, eventually terminating at a platform behind a vape shop in Newquay.
End of the line
Newquay was traditionally known as a Cornish Magaluf – a place where each summer, young people would come after finishing exams to embark on education in subjects unprintable. Today, it’s still scruffy and there’s still spirited behaviour, but now hipsters, gentrification, food trucks and surf boutiques have moved in.
Still reigning over Newquay’s skyline are grand Victorian hotels built to coincide with the coming of the railway. Among them is the Great Western beach, named after the Victorian hotel overlooking it. This was, of course, in turn named after the railway that brought the first tourists to this shore in the late 19th century.
I spend an evening here, watching as night creeps along the Riviera, reflecting on the generations of holidaymakers ushered here by iron rails over a century and a half. Today, you can still be part of that tradition; you can feel the same sadness felt by other generations, looking at the paper ticket printed ‘Return’.
Getting there
The train isn’t usually a cheap option. Adding a cabin to your ticket costs ‘from’ £49 for a single and £59 for a twin, according to Great Western Railway. We didn’t find any cabins for that price when we checked. Cabins were more than £100, and the total fare around £200.
The website is confusing, as it’s not clear that the cheapest fare options can’t have a cabin added to them. Seat-only options started from around £70 one way when we looked. Booking a cabin also gives you access to lounges and showers at Paddington, Penzance and Truro. Railcards usually offer a third off bookings and are well worth considering if there’s one that could save you money.
The Night Rivera also stops at Reading.
Where to sleep
Royal Duchy Hotel
Another railway-era hotel, the Royal is a grand Victorian pile on the seafront at Falmouth. The rooms are traditional and handsome, the breakfasts expansive (even if service was a little slow on our visit) and the hallways and dining rooms smartly appointed. What marks this place out are the sea views stretching all the way from Pendennis Castle to the Lizard Peninsula.
Price per night for one traveller: £147
Price per night for two sharing: £226
Breakfast included
Book via the Royal Duchy website
The Quies
This stridently idiosyncratic guesthouse sits high on a hillside a short walk outside the centre, and away from the summer madness, of central Newquay. Plush and purple furnishings in our room won’t meet everyone’s interior design tastes – but everything is spotlessly clean, the pricing is very reasonable and no one can question the friendliness of the staff.
Price per night for one traveller: £100
Price per night for two sharing: £100
Breakfast: £15
Book via The Quies Hotel website
Harbour Hotel
Atop perhaps the most magnificent perch in St Ives, Harbour Hotel is set on a steep slope directly over the station and Porthminster beach (and with correspondingly steep room rates to match). Appropriately for bohemian St Ives, interiors are dotted with striking artworks and nautical flourishes. There’s an on-site spa with wonderful views, and a fine restaurant.
Price per night for one traveller: £219
Price per night for two sharing: £245
Breakfast included.
Book via the Harbour Hotel website
