RAILWAY LINES
The Venice Simplon Orient Express. Photo / Belmond
Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha Rajesh In the age of high-speed rail, you might think there is little to savour and less to say about long-distance travel. You’d be wrong. As Rajesh demonstrates, there is life yet in both the trip and the telling. In Thailand, swapping food with a Dutch family, she is told: “We have a word . . . gezellig, which means that there are no boundaries and that everyone is sharing and getting along . . . like we are a train family.” Gezellig resounds through her pages.
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
In the 1970s, Paul Theroux reckoned, “Most travel writing was about vacations and comforts, not real journeys and ordeals.” He would do his best to put that right, in the process turning the travel book into a travelling one. Starting in London on the Orient Express, he went to Istanbul and then through Asia from country to country, bent over a rocking notebook “like Trollope scribbling between postal assignments”. Thirty-three years on, he would retrace his route for Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) — but neither the writer nor the writing was as lean as here.
Stranger on a Train by Jenny Diski
What started as an anti-travel book ended up winning the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2003. Diski, a stay-at-home in search of thinking space, went around the US by rail, intending to smoke, daydream and — initially — ignore a continent and its people. Her book, which moves between recollections of her troubled teen years and observations of America, is evidence of a truth all travellers acknowledge: accidents will happen.
Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line by James Attlee
“God’s Wonderful Railway”, they used to call the link Isambard Kingdom Brunel forged between London and Bristol, and in Attlee’s hands it is indeed full of wonders, prompting passages on everything from infrared technology to resurrection as painted by Stanley Spencer in Cookham. His book is partly an exploration of places and buildings on or just off the line; partly a collection of stories about people who have been associated with it, whether as planners, staff or passengers; and partly a rumination on the nature of travel.