I make sure to reach St Pancras International well in time — more than one hour before the 9.05 to Brussels. It’s a wise move: the weather has just turned warm in this first week of June and everyone seems to have decided to leave London at the same time, and all via the Eurostar terminal. When I go to join the serpentine queue, I am directed to a faster-moving gate; the really long queue is for Paris and points south, for which several trains depart this morning; there are far fewer people heading for the Belgian capital and destinations beyond. The train leaves the platform right on time and the journey is uneventful, if you can call slipping under the sea-bed at 160 kmph and then emerging to tear along at 300 kmph uneventful. I’ve made the Eurostar journey to Paris many times, and to Lille a couple of times, to change for south-heading connections, but I’ve never taken this branch that curves north to deposit you at Gare Bruxelles-Midi in just three hours.

I’ve always loved train journeys and this time, travelling from London to Berlin, I’ve had the brainwave that I’ll go by the modern, high-speed chhuk-chhuk instead of bearing the tortures of cramped seats on budget airlines from stressful airports. The tricky bit has been choosing the right connections: the 9 am departure is the first feasible one from London, which means there are only 25 minutes to change platforms and catch the Deutsche Bahn ICE train to Cologne, and then only 20 minutes to change and catch the next ICE to Berlin. As the Eurostar approaches the station, I’m grateful when the conductor informs us on the PA system that the next connecting train to Cologne will leave from Platform 5.

The platform at Bruxelles Midi is hot, chaotic with caroming passengers, and interminably long. Coming out, there are several barriers and none of the screens showing arrivals and departures. Swirling around with a too-heavy suitcase (too many books and bits of stationery), I can’t, at first, see any signs with platform numbers. I ask someone who looks like he works for the railways for Voie Cinq and he points in a direction. I stumble at speed, weaving clumsily through the crowd, heart pumping at a nasty rate, to finally arrive at the bottom of the escalator. Going up, something feels wrong. There don’t seem to be any people about — not what you expect near one of the most popular train connections in the Continent. Sure enough, I emerge onto a nearly-empty platform where some workers are poking around a Thalys, one of the French high-speed gaaris, and not the German one I need. Continuing my one-man impersonation of Laurel and Hardy, I turn around and stumble down the descending escalator. I look around and spot a woman in a red uniform vest who seems to be talking to passengers. I reach her and wait. When my turn comes, I ask about the Cologne train. She looks at me just as you would at two dumb vaudeville clowns. “Cologne is gone, M’sieu. It was 10 minutes ago, from Voie 3. You must look at the screen for this information.” I wanted to go all Captain Haddock on her and shout that by ten thousand pulsating pommes frites there were no screens to be seen anywhere. But then I saw her hand and where it was pointing, and it was to a stalactite of screens hanging from the ceiling.

Signage is a subtle and crucial thing and the countries and institutions that master it earn my respect and gratitude. Belgium, or rather specifically, Brussels’s main train station, is not on this list. The far-too-few arrival/departure screens are small and crowded with rows of tiny type that are hard to read. Then, since the information needs to be in three languages, French, Flemish/Dutch and English, the ‘distribution’ among the three means you have to wait a long time for the English to come up; it sits there in a crowd of small letters and numbers for a short time and then it’s gone, turned into one of the other languages.

After missing my train, it takes me a while to locate the main information centre. Waiting in queue with my token, I connected with two other parties who had missed the change between the Eurostar and the Cologne train, a group of three women on vacation and a couple heading for a wedding. As we waited, we compared notes as to where we had gone wrong and our stories matched — wrong-footed by the conductor’s erroneous announcement and the absence of easily locatable screens that made sure we didn’t stand a chance. The people at the counter were kind and unsurprised: they had clearly seen a lot of this and they changed all our tickets without fuss.

I now have the time to get a coffee and a croissant and to go outside to have a cigarette. I puff away quickly, standing next to the assortment of travellers, tense immigrants and junkies hovering around the station entrance. Back inside, I meet up with the others and we team up to face the challenging signage. The signs for the platforms are big and bold, white on blue, in one of the classic Sans-serif fonts so loved by the great-grandchildren of Bauhaus but they point poetically imprecisely in the general directions of platform clusters rather than at specific platforms. So, heading to Platform 6, from where the next train to Cologne is supposed to leave, it takes us a good ten minutes between seeing the sign and actually locating the platform.

Finally, a good couple of hours after I’m supposed to, I leave behind the festering chaos of Bruxelles-Midi on a high-speed Deutsche Bahn intercity train. Cologne Main Station is as hot and crowded as Brussels on this early day of summer, but changing trains is a comparatively tension-free business. The plentiful screens are clearly visible, as is the big digital board listing the arrivals and departures. It’s clear from which platform my Berlin train will leave, as is the time of departure. Settling down in my seat, I look over at the huge cathedral that looms outside the glass and girders of the Hauptbahnhof roof. The train begins to move more or less on time, and we are only about 25 minutes late reaching Berlin. My friends are waiting for me when I finally reach their place just before midnight. After all the greetings and hugs, they ask me if I would try this train thing a second time between London and Berlin. “Maybe a different route. Maybe an overnight stop in Paris or Amsterdam. Never this one again, that’s for sure.”