We got back to Shenyang Railway Station after the obligatory local history tourism double-handler, a saunter through the Imperial Palace and the Marshal Zhang Mansion, both in the Shenhe district. We were booked on the 6:39 pm sleeper to Baihe (AKA Baishan) on route to the much lauded, much visited, apparently scenic natural wonder, Changbaishan.

The train sleeping arrangements comprised six beds in each compartment (three bunks vertically on top of each other x two). Snug? Yes! Compact? Yes! Comfortable? Not a snowflake’s hope in hell! We were travelling in basically “human cattle class”, the pertinent term to describe the Shenyang to Baihe rail trip was definitively not de luxe travel.

Of course with our luck we scored the top bunks so it involved a tight and perilously ascent and descent up a tiny, narrow rung of heavily worn steps before levering yourself into the bed…climbing down in the middle of the night in the pitch dark was even more fun! No chance of falling into bed, but every likelihood of falling out of it!

Once perched in the top bunk you pretty much gained an immediate sense of the severe spacial limitations. Barely two feet to the ceiling at one end and half that at the other which slopes away sharply to where a window should have been. So, with insufficient space to even sit up we found ourselves confined to the horizontal position encased in our snug, personal “sardine tins”. The passengers in the two rows of bunk beds directly below us BTW had a much better deal…they were the recipients of appreciatively more vertical space than we did (every little bonus bit counts in a sardine tin!). And they didn’t have to risk breaking their ankle every time they embarked on a early am trek to the toilet.

Ducking room only on the top bunks

When the lights were turned out, the air con went with it, so we were left in the dark sweltering under a warm, thick doona. We lay there listening to the train’s curious movements, a constant rattling and grinding of parts of the carriage (plus all the other human noises that permeated through a very crowded carriage) until we managed to gather a few snatches of sleep here and there.

Sleep here, like on a long-haul airplane trip, often depends on the right circumstances, and for me is very hard to pull off! But the attendant prowling past at regular intervals at night flashing his torchlight into the compartments, was one more impediment to the illusion of getting anything remotely like a smooth and decent night’s sleep. The train attendant’s very un-softly softly intrusion made me feel like I was in cell block 79D of the maximum security wing.

As I recounted earlier, a trip to the bathroom at night required a particularly hazardous descent in the dark to ground level. Once I negotiated my way along the unsteady aisle through a forest of protruding feet to the back of the carriage, there were more issues to contend with. The toilet’s (what I will laughingly refer to as amenities) were threadbare (no surprises here): no soap in the washroom and no paper in the toilet, but the windows had bars on them which prevented escape from the train by that avenue if you felt inclined to do so! Meanwhile at the end of the carriage there was the odd, Chinese man who could be openly seen (and smelt) furiously puffing away on a cigarette, while the train attendants, either furtively or with blissful insouciance, turned a blind eye to the misdemeanour by blatantly failing to enforce CRH’s train policy of Jìnzhî chōyān! (no smoking!”) which CRH hollowly announces every ten minutes on its on-board services.

The train chugged along at a slow, erratic pace, except for the too-frequent times during the night when it was completely stationery for inordinately long periods! The two-and-a-hours standstill just before dawn was a case in point. Had we broken down? Were we there yet? Was the train simply resting or more or less completely immobilised? All these possibilities, we had no idea, and there was no clarification forthcoming from the train personnel. Finally, the creaking old “state-of-the-past” locomotive limped in to Baihe Station a tad after eight in the morning.

After an indifferent night’s sleep the locals were still up for a hardy breakfast

The upshot of the delay was that we were two hours late arriving at Baihe, a consequential delay for our plans because we arrived too late to make the long relay journey to Changbaishan that day. In the end we paid ¥320 for the privilege of a marathon thirteen-and-a-half hour trip in a rickety old train which was alternately hot and cold, and half the time going absolutely nowhere! Bet this kind of sub-standard service experience doesn’t make it into the glossy promotional videos and information blurbs churned out by CRH for its bottomless market!

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* apologies to the Monkees (at least to the 50% of the members who are extant) for paraphrasing the group’s 1966 debut hit Last Train to Clarksville in the piece’s title