Rail Travel, and the Man in Seat 61

Most readers of my blog probably realize that I love train travel. Trains offer the adventure and sense of journey that overland travel provides, with the comfort and relative dependability of air travel, all wrapped up in an experience that is both civilized and romantic.  Although of course the time demands of modern living mean that train travel isn’t always an option (especially in the United States, where insufficient investment in passenger rail means that very few routes offer practically competitive service), when we are out traveling, roaming the world, I almost always opt to travel by train, whenever possible.

Train travel, like cruises, are sometimes trips unto themselves–with the journey as much an experience as the destination.  The most famous of these is perhaps the Trans-Siberian Railway, which crosses all of Asia on a continuous eight-day journey.  Connections to the Chinese rails, at one end, and the European rail network, on the other, mean that you can travel all the way from London to Saigon, on the rails, starting by crossing the Chunnel on the Eurostar, across Europe on a whole range of networks and then from Moscow to Beijing, and then from Beijing to the Vietnamese railway on the reliable Chinese rail system.

You can search the label “train” on my blog for some information on traveling by train, but the site I usually recommend for international rail travel is The Man in Seat Sixty-One, one of the internet’s very best travel sites, which includes an amazing amount of detail on train systems around the world, including helpful pictures of car layouts, and a surprising number of schedules and fares.  The site is named for his favorite seat on Eurostar first class.  Many thanks to Mark Smith for creating and maintaining such an amazing repository of travel information!