Bonding on a stalled train
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In 1990, Derek Barclay was 21 and studying to become a construction engineer. He’d saved up money from an unglamorous summer job building a prison to buy an Interrail pass.
“Then, I dumped my bag at my mum’s house and said, ‘I’m off to Europe.’ She was horrified,” Derek tells CNN Travel today.
“The idea was to go from Casablanca to Istanbul. But I never went to either. Along the way I met Nina and I got distracted …”
While Nina and Derek formally met for the first time on the stalled train in Belgrade, Derek had first spotted Nina on a busy station platform, some hours earlier, in Budapest.
When he spotted her sitting on a bench, smiling and laughing with Loa, Derek was struck by Nina right away. For a moment, he imagined getting to know her, what she might be like. Where she might be from, where she might be going.
But then Derek had ended up on a different train. He’d met and got chatting to Steve the Englishman and Paul the Irishman. The trio had shared a couple of beers, fallen asleep, and woken, with a start, in Belgrade, to a suddenly-empty carriage. That’s when they panicked.
“We woke up, and just ran down the railway line — because we’re just about to miss this train to Athens — we jumped on the train as it was pulling away, and then it stopped,” Derek tells CNN Travel today. “Apparently that’s what they had to do to get the strike official.”
When Derek, Steve and Paul opened the door to Nina’s carriage, Derek didn’t immediately take Nina in, focusing instead on the near-empty compartment.
“Two of them in there, this carriage for eight, they’d spread stuff everywhere. It was obvious it was a ruse to try and get people not to go in. And we thought, ‘We’re not having any of that,’” says Derek, laughing. “So we squeezed in, and that was that.”
It was only when he ended up sitting opposite Nina that Derek realized she was the woman he’d noticed on the Budapest train platform.
Then they got chatting, and didn’t stop. They talked about a shared love of nature. About Derek being a member of Greenpeace. About Sweden and Scotland.
Jan 22, 2025
