THE OVERNIGHT sleeper train to Scotland was, for me, a childhood ritual of the purest joy, a transport of delight. Sealed into that flying cocoon, one entered a strange state of dreamy exhilaration. Karl Marx, himself a former railway clerk, noted that rail travel had caused the “annihilation of space by time”. Time evaporated in the tiny compartment, with the magical, rattling rhythm that allowed you to leave the world in dark London and re-emerge in the misty Perth morning, where an incomprehensible Scottish train steward hammered on the door and shoved in a tray of tongue-melting, brick-red tea.

What I do not remember is sleeping. I recall a defiantly narrow bunk, the stiff, too-small sheet that came loose by Watford, a cardboard pillow, and a fluorescent blue light on the ceiling that shone all night. I remember trying to use the cabin chamber pot with the British Rail logo and then decanting the result, thrillingly, through a special tilting cabinet, on to the hurtling track somewhere around Crewe, while we sang:

Passengers must please refrain
From passing water while the train
Is standing in the station,
I love you.

But mostly I recall the wonder of whistling through the night in a box: lying on my back, drowsily heading north, while going nowhere. On the tenth anniversary of easyJet — cheap, efficient, uncomfortable, unmemorable — the night sleeper is one of few remaining legacies from an age of more gentle travel.

This week a 3,600-name petition was presented to Downing Street to plead for the preservation of the Paddington to Penzance overnight train, the Night Riviera, which has ferried snoring passengers to the bottom left-hand corner of England since the 19th century. The service is under threat because, according to rail bosses, it is uneconomical, losing as much as £1 million a year. The Scottish overnight services are also said to be wasteful, expensive and in danger.

There are sound practical, as well as romantic, reasons for saving the sleepers. The roads to Cornwall are notoriously clogged, while the overnight train is the only way for Cornish businessfolk to get to London for early morning meetings. As Lord George, former Governor of the Bank of England, now resident in Cornwall, pointed out when presenting the petition, the economics of the service remain unclear, since crew say that the sleepers are often fully booked. The suspicion is that rail bosses are seeking to get rid of a service simply because it is bureaucratically fiddly, an oddity.

Quite apart from the economic and political arguments, there is a deep-rooted attachment to the idea of the overnight train, part of our long-running national romance with the railways. Ten years ago, when BR tried to scrap the Highland sleeper to Fort William, there was a national outcry — joined by many people who had never travelled on that train, and never would. BR was forced to back down, and the so-called Deerstalker Express survives. Like beefeaters, classical music and country churches, the night train is one of those cultural artefacts worth preserving as part of the collective imagination, even though it may run at a loss. It has an enduring value over and above value for money.

In both Britain and America, the railway holds a distinct cultural position as a symbol of romance and discovery: in the US, it is the keening whistle of the night train as the tracks expanded westward; in Britain, the slow chug of economic progress and technological change. When Jim Weatherly wrote his classic Midnight Train to Georgia, he had originally intended to name it Midnight Plane, until it was pointed out that a mere aircraft had none of the romantic pull of a locomotive.

Trains have always been deeply erotic: the Victorians knew this, and thus insisted on providing “women only” carriages. In Forster’s Howard’s End, Margaret Schlegel thrills to the seductive rumble of the Great Western Express, and in Stamboul Train, Graham Greene, as ever, brilliantly captured love on the tracks: “In spite of her smile, he thought her frightened and wondered why. He loosed her hands in order to pull down the blinds of the corridor windows, so that they seemed suddenly to be alone in a small clattering box . . . her laughter lay, an almost imperceptible pool of sound, beneath the pounding and clatter of the express.” Brief Encounter summoned up the sweet sadness of trains that pass in the night, and at the end of North by Northwest, Cary Grant squeezes into a compartment with Eva Marie Saint, and Hitchcock, the smutty old symbolist, sends the train hurtling into the tunnel.

The train made modern Britain, and the railways are carved into the national imagination just as they lattice the landscape. Cheap excursion trains created the British holiday, urbanisation and suburbanisation followed the rails and fiction emerged from the parlour with mass-produced “railway novels”. Even Victorian cows learnt to live by the rhythm of the trains, their milking geared to the railway timetable to ensure catching the milk train.

Rail travel is undergoing an overdue renaissance today, at precisely the moment when the most beloved service of all is being allowed to die in its sleep. With government policy aimed at reducing road travel and oil prices spiralling, this 19th-century invention offers a green 21st-century solution. We have become addicted to the quick, easyCheap, fuel-profligate rush from place to place. We have become inured to the discomfort and lack of privacy offered by most modern trains; we somehow expect to be hurried, and harried, and herded from place to place.

The sleeper train is different. The response to the threatened closure of the Highland Sleeper, and now the Night Riviera service, is a signal of how deeply cherished is this monument to civilised travel.

Travelling can still be pleasure, but perhaps it takes a night on the rails, with or without Eva Marie Saint, to remember that.

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