Monisha Rajesh has a passion for rail travel. In a previous book the author spent three months hopping on and off trains on a 25,000-mile odyssey around India; this time she broadens her horizons and travels round the world. Her aim is to discover whether, in our age of bullet trains and cut-price air travel, the romance of the railways still exists.
The seven-month journey, which she undertakes with her fiance, is undoubtedly a feat of endurance. Indeed, the scale of the endeavour – 80 trains of distinctly variable comfort, reliability and safety, travelling some 45,000 miles – would be enough to daunt even the most hardy adventurer.
They begin with a brisk tour of Europe, ending up in Moscow, where they take some nightmarish taxi journeys to find Patriot Park, a “military Disneyland” recently opened by President Putin. They then catch the Trans-Mongolian Railway to Beijing, an 11-day journey including stopovers in Irkutsk, Siberia, to visit Lake Baikal (“the deepest, oldest and largest freshwater lake in the world”) and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, which turns out to be something of a disappointment: “The city’s old culture … had collapsed under the might of … KFCs and an Imax.”
Then it’s on through China, Vietnam (where trains resemble “mobile skips”), Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore (“a starchy, characterless city”) and Japan, a nation that has truly “mastered utopian travel”. After flying to Vancouver they head east to Toronto, travelling 2,775 miles on The Canadian, “the most efficient way to absorb the vastness of the world’s second-largest country in one sitting”. From New York they go down to New Orleans before looping up to Seattle and back to Canada. Although observing that “most people drawn to the Amtrak trains were unhinged to varying degrees”, she concludes “Americans who have never ridden on their railways have no idea what they are missing.”
After flying into Pyongyang they take an arranged tour of North Korea (“a trip of a lifetime”), then return to China, catching a train to Lhasa, Tibet, where Rajesh struggles with altitude sickness and finds that the city has been turned into “an Orwellian nightmare of CCTV, road blockades and pop-up police stations”. Then it’s homeward bound through northwest China, Kazakhstan and Russia, before heading through Poland and Germany to Italy, where they catch the the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, travelling in well-earned luxury to London.
For Rajesh, the romance of train travel does indeed live on, “in the passengers who would always tell their story to strangers, offer advice, share their food, and give up their seats”. Unexpected acts of kindness and generosity of spirit create a unique sense of community, “like we are a train family”, as one traveller tells her in Thailand.
She glimpses an enthralling swirl of cultures and landscapes on a journey filled with memorable brief encounters: “Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.”
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