As the old cliché testifies, it’s often the journey not the destination that’s most rewarding. With that in mind, here’s ten spectacular journeys around Britain. Travelling on The Snowdon Mountain Railway, Gwynedd A haunting whistle cries out across the wild Snowdonia valleys as Wyddfa, one of the original 1895 steam locos, leaves the Halfway station bound…
This week we’re asking you to share your own travel traumas, those memories from a life travelling you’d perhaps rather forget. Or at least when you learnt a valuable lesson or two. Here Gemma Smyth recounts her hungry odyssey on a Greek train. Share your experiences below… It’s nearing midnight and I’ve been waiting most…
Travel by camel through the Sahara, hike the Appalachian trail, and grab forty winks on an overnight train from Nairobi as we take a look at the world’s most epic journeys. Crossing the desolate sands, Niger A camel journey across the Sahara is an authentic and intimate experience that gets to the core of the…
The Travel Bucket List 30 unforgettable travel experiences chosen by Rough Guides writers and editors and other travel experts Read the list >> Get lost in Fez el Bali Keith Drew, Co-author of the Rough Guide to Morocco There are few places left in the world where you can get well and truly lost. But…
The train was travelling at top speed when the accident occurred. After decades of service the rail line finally snapped, buckling in front of the locomotive and forcing it off the track. Mercifully the top speed in question was a shade under twenty miles per hour, and the passengers were able to disembark safely and…
You don’t need a train spotter to tell you that the Semmering Railway is a little bit special. Running 42km between the towns of Gloggnitz and Murzzuschlag, the line – a World Heritage Site – winds through the last surge of the eastern Austrian Alps before they taper off into the Hungarian plains. Of course,…
First, tea is served. In a fancy teapot, with biscuits, by a butler dressed in pristine white uniform. You gaze lazily out of the window as porters labour in the crushing afternoon humidity, blissfully cool in your air-conditioned cabin. Then the train eases out of the station: the skyscrapers of Singapore soon fall away, and you’re across the Straits…
Even after seven unbroken days on a train from Moscow, nothing can prepare you for the Chinese border. As you pull into the platform, which is lit up in neon colours, a Chinese-tinged version of the Vienna Waltz comes blaring over the Tannoy. Trying to work out the cultural relevance of this is a hopeless…
Is it the fact that the British invented them? Or that children know Thomas and Percy better than their own parents? Or that peaked caps, billowing steam and The Railway Children bring a strange quiver to grown men’s hearts? Whatever the reason, there’s something about the British and their steam railway heritage that only a…