Leave London by train after work on Thursday and be in Barcelona for coffee the next morning

MATTHEW PAR RIS

Ihave found a secret railway. Northern Spain knows it is possible to travel by train from Barcelona up into the Catalan Pyrenees. Southern France knows it is possible to travel by train from Toulouse up into the Hautes-Pyrenees. What few seem to know is that the lines meet. Into one end of a strange frontier station called Latour-deCarol, near Andorra, Spanish trains trundle a couple of times a day; into the other come trains from France.

Between Latour-de-Carol and Paris there is a sleeper service. So, to travel by train from Barcelona to Paris, you need not skirt the Pyrenees by the Mediterranean; you can go directly north and over the top. Leaving London after work on Thursday, you can be in Barcelona for coffee the next morning; leaving Barcelona late Sunday afternoon, you can be at work by eleven on Monday — in my case writing this. I have just passed a long weekend in Catalonia, travelling both ways by overnight train.

The two nations' railway systems, RENFE and the SNCF, seem to be trying to hide this possibility. Eurostar to Paris (Nord) is easy, but Gare d'Austerlitz looks as if a bomb has hit it. From this dilapidated station, repair work and scaffolding everywhere, all the lines that do not matter seem to run. On arrival (it is 20 minutes by Metro from the Gare du Nord) you begin to fear you have been misinformed and that the 21.56 night-sleeper to Latour-de-Carol promised on your ticket is a fiction. The annunciators are blank, Down one platform you spot an undistinguished-looking train, no ticket barriers, and a railway official camped on the platform with a makeshift desk and a sheaf of papers. Yes, the train exists and your couchette in a six-sleeper compartment (second class) is ready. It is perfectly comfortable if chance has not sent you a fat French chamber-mate who snores.

Chance had. So my companions and I took a bottle of wine into the empty cycle compartment where we sat on the floor and plotted for our snorer an emergency tracheotomy using a ballpoint pen; but, after the wine, returned to the couchettes and slept anyway.

You awake briefly to some shunting before dawn in Toulouse, then drift back into sleep as your part of the train begins clickety-clacking up the branch line towards Ax-les-Thermes in the Pyrenean foothills.

At about seven you awake again, and peer behind the blinds. Snowcapped peaks, lit in the early sun, soar into the sky above. Streams rush by. The line is steep and the train, pulled by two huge electric locomotives, slows. After a stop at Puymorens to let the Andorra-bound off, and an interminable tunnel, the train pulls into its destination, Most French travellers have by now departed at intermediate stations.

Latour-de-Carol is a substantial station with rotting goods-yards, few trains and a deserted customs-and-immigration cabin. With Franco's Spain officially neutral and France under German occupation, this must have seen some odd doings during the second world war, and it still feels weird. Over the way you spot a brightly painted, graffiticovered little local train, waiting on its immensely wide Spanish rails to start the three-and-a-half-hour journey to Barcelona; but it is hardly eight: time for coffee and a croissant. You can buy the RENFE ticket (the fare is negligible) on the train.

As the sun climbs you descend, clattering down towards the plains, the Mediterranean and Barcelona. But we stopped well short of the Catalan capital — in an inland foothills town called Manlieu. My family live nearby, and we spent three glorious days walking and riding, and eating and drinking in village restaurants. I seldom bother with Barcelona, a city as overrated by the British as its hinterland, the Catalan Pyrenees and Garroxta, are overlooked.

Let me describe the journey by rail back up into France while fresh in my mind from yesterday, for Sunday, 21 April was a beautiful day in northern Spain: cool and clear with all the fruit trees in blossom. Our train from Barcelona passed through Manlieu at 6.30 p.m. The stationmaster, unaware that it went on to Latour-de-Carol (most terminate a few miles short at the last town in Spain, Puigcerda), sold us tickets anyway. Soon the four-carriage electric train, quite full, began to climb.

The single track weaves up a valley beside a road, criss-crossing the river Ter and plunging in and out of tunnels through the rock gorges that contain it, pausing at stations, some abandoned, to pass the down-trains. At Ripoll, a mountain town with a fine abbey, the rear carriages were shed. We hurried to the front after happening to hear a platform announcement.

Then the loveliest part of the journey began. The road had disappeared above us as our track hugged a steep valley by a noisy stream, Outside, oak, beech and hazel were coming into leaf while the upper slopes were clad in pine and juniper. At one isolated stone village where the goats were coming in for milking, the tiny railway station advertised sausages for sale. Shade filled the valley. Snowy hilltops shone in the late afternoon sun.

The track entered the mountain, our tunnel performing an upwards screw to bring us out higher. In the ski-station of La Molina the light was gold and a brook meandered across an open meadow. Then a wall of warm, dry, crumbly rock so typical of the Pyrenees towered straight up outside the carriage window, and straggling briars brushed the roof.

At Puigcerda most passengers alighted, but a group who shared the secret of this international rail journey clattered across the high plain where long ago France and Spain settled by treaty their frontier — turning Llivia (a little town the treatydraftsmen forgot to list) into a tiny Spanish enclave a couple of miles into France. We met the miniature track of the 'petit train jaune': a marvellous route along the French side of the Pyrenees towards Perpignan, down which a little yellow engine draws squealing holidaymakers in open carriages.

The SNCF sleeper was waiting in Latourde-Carol. It was half past eight. The cycle compartment was empty again and some Dutch women lent us a corkscrew. Mountains outside faded pink into indigo and, as light drained from a twilight sky, colour was drawn into the peaks, which glowed.

I awoke in Paris. It was 7 a.m. All the newspapers said that Jean-Marie le Pen had knocked Lionel Jospin out of the presidential race. Liberation's front page was a single word: `NON'.

Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.