Trains Are The Travel Experience Personified

Hello, everybody. It’s a beautiful day. So let’s relax, because relaxing is all you can do when you travel by train.

I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. They’re not my words, they are words of Paul Theroux in his introduction to The Great railway Bazaar. One of the preeminent travel books of all time. Well, Paul, I often hear trains go past and I think of chewing gum stuck to the seats, of obnoxious conductors, hollow apologies for persistent delays.

But that was before, that was when I considered trains purely as a mode of transport. Paul Theroux, and then my own travels, introduced me to an idea that trains and not just a means of getting from A to B. They are the travel experience personified, in a way.

Everything Slows Down

I’m Steven Bailey. I’m not going to quote more from Paul Theroux or other of my favorite literary people. But today let’s go on this journey by train. On a train, there is nothing to worry about. You can relax, or you can’t relax, but it won’t change the fact that you can’t get off. In many places, it won’t change the fact that you can’t use your computer, you won’t get any wifi. You can’t do much, but gaze out of the window. So, relax. Feel everything slowed down.

Of course, the view is a treat. Watching the landscape change slowly, yet decisively. It’s perhaps the train’s greatest attraction — crossing continents, dissecting deserts, meandering through jungle. On a train you slice through nature in a completely new way, without roads, without cars, without anything but this track.

You can read a book and gaze out at the same time. You can go to the restaurant car, you can dine and you can have these other experiences. But ultimately, this train you take is about that classic mantra: “It’s not about the destination, but the journey.”

Across Siberia On A Train

So, where can we go? Where can we go on these great train journeys? The one that got me and the one that inspired me to leave the UK actually on my first ever trip, was the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was the Trans-Siberian that inspired me to leave the UK and set off on an overland journey. As far as I could go. Like my aim was to go from the North of England to some family in Melbourne, in the South of Australia. And the Trans-Siberian was the daddy of train journeys along the way.

Forest to grassland, to deserts, with the occasional stops every six hours at graying cities where this great army of babushkas, old Russian women who’d gather on the platform to sell local delicacies like boiled potatoes in a plastic bag — or raw, completely inedible fish — or home made vodka, that pretty much guarantees blindness.

And on that journey, I really saw that Siberia’s beauty is not one that you find in photos. It’s harsh, it’s inhospitable, but over five days, wow. Wow. It made me feel relaxed. It gave me such nuance, such a big place, had so many facets to it that I could only understand by going on a train. And then since then, there are so many others that I really want to recommend to you, journeys that show you a landscape in a new way, but also are incredibly relaxing.

Train Journeys Around The World

In Africa, you can take a train from Cape Town all the way to Victoria Falls. A luxury train across South Africa and all across Zimbabwe. In New Zealand, there’s an amazing train ride, a one-day train ride, pretty much the length of the North Island — New Zealand’s North Island. Through volcanoes, through forest — through Middle Earth.

And then on the South Island, there’s one that goes East to West, coast to coast, from glaciers through the mountains to Christchurch on the other side, eight or nine hours. And you, it feels like you have experienced all of New Zealand. It’s so invigorating.

Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is so special. It’s special because of how you get there. You take the train to this lost city in the middle of nowhere. You go through the jungle. Fabulous experience. Or perhaps in Ireland, Belmond Grand Hibernian train journey in Ireland. A really high-end experience, very slow train, completely immersing you in Irish landscapes.

There are others you can connect as well. There’s quite a famous one, the Rocky Mountaineer, Vancouver to Calgary, crossing a lot of Canada. A real adventure you can find in Vietnam, the Reunification Express still goes all the way from Hanoi to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. If you can only do a bit of it — it’s 36 hours, it’s quite uncomfortable — but if you can only do a bit of it, then the middle section is great between Hue and Danang, you kind of snake along these verging cliffs beside the South China Sea. But whatever bit you do, you’re going to get a nice glimpse of rural Vietnamese life. You’re going to get a glimpse of what the landscape really is.

And of course another — kind of unmissable in terms of bucketlist of all train journeys — is to take a train in India. I can’t pinpoint a single one. Indian Railways is the world’s largest employer. That’s how vast the train network is. And whatever class, whatever journey, it’s always a wonderful experience.

So as now we get into a mode of traveling fast, going from place to place, perhaps we lose track of the importance of the journey, not flying in from one to the other, but witnessing and experiencing the changes along the way.

It’s something that Paul Theroux inspired in me, the Great Siberian Railway embedded in me and something I have done ever since. And I encourage you to do the same.