Choo, Choo: Great Railway Journeys
You Can't Afford to Miss!

There's something about great railway journeys that I just can't resist. When I was a university student in Switzerland, I had a 'general pass' - a relatively cheap train travel pass that allowed me to ride all trains (and buses and boats!) in the country for a year.

I'd hop on a train after classes, ride from Geneva to Zurich for a few hours, and ride right back, home in time for bed. I studied in the restaurant or bar car, watching the country go by.

I took my first train journey when I was five weeks old - my mother packed me up and crossed Europe to Turkey on the then Orient Express to join my father. I haven't looked back since and not even a train derailment in Thailand or the Death Gorge in Burma dampened my desire for great train journeys.

What's so great about great railway journeys?

That is not a difficult question for those of us who love the sound of metal on metal.

• Trains are fast - in Europe it's almost faster to take a train than to fly, if you factor in the trips to the airport
• You get to see the scenery!
• In most parts of the developing world trains are cheaper than planes
• It's a wonderful way of sharing local people's lives for a few hours (or days)
• Get travel tips from your fellow travelers
• You'll have plenty of time to think, to read, to meditate, to look at people
• Save a night's accommodation costs by taking an overnight ride (and wake up in a new city - or country)
• It's convenient: end up downtown rather than at a faraway airport
• Taste romance on some of the world's most scenic journeys

Riding the rails across the Rockies
Photo: Steve Jurvetson via Flickr

Preparing for great railway journeys

Use the same travel packing list you would for your backpaking trip but take more reading material - enough books to last the entire trip. There's a good chance you won't find any to buy along the way!

Here are a few packing tips to make your Great Railway Journey more comfortable:

• Wear the most comfortable thing you have - stretchy, light, soft... remember you may hardly be moving for several days and might be spending the night in these clothes.
• Bring a sandwich or finger food. Train food can be expensive, and not every city has vendors chasing every train.
• Some gum or candy may ease a queasy stomach. In many countries suspension is soft, and trains lurch from side to side.
• Bring an inflatable pillow - they won't be provided. The pillow can double as padding on hard, wooden third-class seats.
• And bring a towel, especially if you're spending several days on board.
• Some comfortable shoes that you can easily slip on and off would also be good.

Whatever you bring, make sure you can carry it yourself! Baggage tends to disappear more easily when you let go of it.

A bit of history

The railway really came into its own as a mode of travel around the mid-1800s.

Rail travel allowed women of all classes to mingle with men, since they sat side by side on the train. According to historian Amy Richter's book Home on the Rails, train travel changed the way women related to men who were strangers.

All this new freedom to travel came at a time when most Victorian women stayed home, so this unsupervised contact on trains with the opposite sex was seen as pretty daring, if not downright dangerous.

First Class cars were put at their disposal. Smoking men and 'other classes' had their own cars.

By the late 1800s, it was becoming quite hip for women to travel alone - they were seen as independent and plucky, and mostly they were American.

The Viaduct of Death

The world is full of wonderful and exotic Great Railway Journeys. I've listed a few of them below. But the one railway journey that stands out most in my mind is my trip across the Gokteit Viaduct in Burma, before they renovated it.

At 900 feet (274m) high and 2200 feet (670) long, the viaduct was built of rickety old wood and was more than 100 years old. It spans near-vertical gorges on both sides - not for the faint-hearded.

The train was a dirty and dusty, with betel nut spittle on the floor and cracked windows. It was a "monster of silver geometry... its presence there was bizarre, this manmade thing in so remote a place," said Paul Theroux in the Great Railway Bazaar. It crawled so slowly a jogger could have passed it.

From Mandalay to Lashio
Photo: Kok Leng Yeo via Flickr

We towed several sealed cars filled with armed soldiers kept out of sight. Along the viaduct itself, uniformed men with machine guns stood grimly every few meters.

We even had a bit of an incident on board. After all the dire warnings against photography, a Swiss photographer decided to ignore the warnings and put our lives at risk by using a huge telephoto lens outside a window. From a distance a telephoto looks like a weapon and these were uncertain times, with mountains teeming with separatist groups. A strapping Australian jumped on him and wrestled him to the ground, threatening to throw his camera overboard into the gorge if he didn't behave. The Swiss man didn't speak another word the rest of the journey.

A few years after I made this journey in the early 1990s the Burmese junta finally renovated the viaduct. It is still as impressive but there is a slightly lower risk of plunging to your death.

Great railway journeys

What makes a great railway journey? What are the greatest railway journeys on earth? I'm sure you have your own too but here is a very partial and subjective list - some I've taken and others I'm still saving up for.

One of the Great Railway Journeys that lies nearly on my doorstep is the Jungfrau Express, which majestically winds its way up the Alps through the Eiger and into the Jungfraujoch region. It isn't cheap and it isn't fast but if the weather is clear - please make sure it is - you will be sitting on top of Europe.

One of the most-written about train journeys has to be the Orient Express, famous through Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express or Graham Greene's Stamboul Train. I can claim to have taken the trip from Paris to Istanbul, although at five weeks old I can't say I remember much.

Some of my own memorable great railway journeys may not be famous, but for various reasons they stick in my mind.

Pretoria to Maputo in Mozambique: I was the only foreigner on this mostly commercial train bringing goods back from South Africa. I still remember the border guards collecting our passports, jumping into a car and driving off across the border with them! We got them back - but not before going through a few fearful moments.

Mombasa to Nairobi: an overnight train that leaves the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa in the evening. As you wake up, gaze at the giraffes while eating breakfast - a bit like watching the sun rise over a game park and you're in the front-row seat.

Bangkok to Butterworth: the best way to get to one of my favorite places, the island of Penang in Malaysia, on an overnight train.

Trains in Thailand are basically reliable. The train heading north from Bangkok goes either to Chieng Mai (these day's it's almost easier to fly) or to the border with Laos - you feel you're going back a century as you head towards the Laotian border. I derailed on this train once - no one was hurt because the rail car that was mangled was fortunately empty. The twisted metal through the external wall made me realize just how flimsy modern-day construction really is.

There are so many famous trains and I'd love to ride them all...

Bogie swap at Erlian, on the China-Mongolia border
Photo: Kok Leng Yeo via Flickr

One of the great railway journeys I haven't taken yet but would dearly love to is the Trans-Siberian Express, of which there are several versions, depending on whether you are headed for Siberia itself, Mongolia or China. This is a long one - some 9000 kilometers and upwards of a week if you break the journey along the way, say in Irkutsk. You can also take it the other way - from China or Mongolia eastwards to Moscow.

Among the most famous are the Blue Train, an opulent and expensive journey between Pretoria and Cape Town in South Africa; the Ghan, originally called the Afghan Express, crosses the heart of Australia from Adelaide to Darwin; the Glacier Express, from Zermatt to St. Moritz, crosses nearly 300 bridges and 90 tunnels... and I can vouch for this one!

View from the Glacier Express
Photo: Soham Banerjee via Flickr

You could try the Rocky Mountaineer, between Vancouver and Banff in the spectacular Canadian Rockies, or the luxurious Deccan Odyssey from Mumbai to Goa. And the list goes on.

Have you had a memorable railway journey? A trip across a country or a continent, a particularly dangerous or stunningly beautiful trip, or simply a journey that touched you in some way?

Please share your journey with the rest of us by telling us when and where it took place, what struck you most, or what was memorable about it.

Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...

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I've two - one memorable for all the bad reasons, and one for all the good. First, I travelled from Madurai to Chennai in 2nd class unreserved overnight ...

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THE FIRST time I boarded a train was in 1965 to travel from Delhi to Howrah. The train in question was the Toofan Mail as it was then called and unlike ...

Still can't get enough of great railway journeys?

Then try a few books...

• Great Railway Journeys by Mark Tully
• Great Railway Journeys of the West by Max Wade Matthews
• The World Commuter by Christopher Portway
• The World's Great Railway Journeys by Tom Savio