My arrival at Yerevan station is textbook. The taxi driver charges me 600 Dram for the trip, about £1.10. I give him a 400 Dram tip, and he seems very happy, shaking my hand and waving goodbye. “Armnenia good?” he asks me. I tell him “Armenia good, good, good”, as I think his English (far better than my Armenian or even Russian) is very limited. He smiles and leaves me to it. It’s a short stroll into the station, where I find a large and very peaceful Soviet designed hall that reminds me of a Moscow metro station. I can […]
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Over on platform number two of Batumi station this afternoon stand two very different trains. On one side a new double decker Georgian Stadler electric train headed for Tblisi, and opposite it stand seven rather battered old Armenian carriages pulled by a Georgian engine known as train 201, or ‘The Armenian’. It will also head to Tbilisi (at a much slower pace), then turn south, crossing the Armenian frontier and on to Yerevan. I’m very early, and at first the guard of carriage number 6 says I can’t come on board for another 25 minutes. This is a Soviet style […]
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It’s 17.05 on a warm September afternoon on the wide and peaceful platform 1 of the old Ankara station, still functioning behind the modern YHT (high speed) station. If you arrive at the back there are no stairs to deal with, no escalators, just an x-ray machine and you are in at platform level. The woman screening my bags asks me if I have a knife. I tell her it’s little one and just to prepare my food. She accepts this explanation without my needing to open anything to prove my innocence. The ‘Dogu Express’ pulls in slowly from the […]
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Pendik station on the outskirts of Asian Istanbul isn’t the easiest place to reach, especially with heavy luggage. Deciding to avoid multiple forms of public transport, in the end I took a taxi, which took about an hour and cost £17. Please don’t tell my insurers, as Istanbul taxi drivers must rate as some of the maddest in the world, and the traffic can be crazy. But today I’m lucky and I arrive in good time and without any injuries. Descending into the tunnel that forms the working part of the station, I discover that it isn’t possible to get […]
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I keep thinking of this train as the mythical ‘Midnight Express’ from Alan Parker’s 1978 film, which made a big impression on me when I was old enough to watch it. But there were of course no real trains in that film. For Istanbul train based films you have to look to James Bond (‘From Russia With Love’) or Hurcule Poirot (‘Murder on the Orient Express’). Sofia station seems to be a good place to me. It’s a large, slightly brutal, Soviet inspired building, but it is clean and seems safe. Getting a ticket for the Istanbul train proves very […]
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Those of you in the know will be aware that Belgrade has a bit of a railway station identity crisis at the moment. The original station now having closed, the new station called ‘Central’ is open, but barely finished it is not yet capable of dealing with all the services it is supposed to at the moment. So confusingly, the single daily summer service from Belgrade to Sofia currently departs from a tiny station in a leafy suburb of the city called Topcider. My train from Zagreb yesterday arrived in the Central station though.. Both have ticket offices, neither have […]
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There are twenty-five platforms at Munchen Hbf, but tonight it would seem that all the international night trains are going to depart from platform 12. On consultation with a station manager it turns out that my train is a polymorph. Four trains begin as one and take on their own route during the night. One huge composition of differing rail carriages sits at platform 12 with staff wearing all sorts of uniforms. It feels a little like arriving at a new boarding school and trying to find your housemaster and dormitory. In search of carriage 271 I pass carriages going […]
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With my latest book finally off my desk and in the hands of my publisher, I have been getting itchy feet here at HQ. The trouble is that I come across so many great ideas for rail routes and places to visit by train. Almost too many. I note them down in a special little book, but my downfall is that don’t take immediate action on actually implementing them. Throughout my life I have always been a little over planned and (in my own opinion), not spontaneous enough. I spent too long in a business where everything was planned and […]
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You might well have been wondering what I have been up to since I returned from my United States coast to coast adventure late last year. The answer is simply that I have been working flat out on my new book. A Bridge Even Further is the second book in my Trans-Siberian trilogy, and I’m pleased to be able to say that it was finally published this week. Your feedback on my first book has been really helpful in deciding how to approach writing A Bridge Even Further. I wanted to keep all the detail of my experiences of the individual trains, […]
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Travelling across the U.S. by train recently has revealed a brand new language to me; I have discovered the dialect of the American railway. I now speak fluent “Amtrak”, and you can too. The train language of the rest of the world has had limited chance to interbreed with the U.S, leaving America with a unique set of rail words. Most make some sense to English speakers, but a variety of carriage (sorry, car) types and multiple names for the same thing can at times become confusing. In addition, the first time traveller may be surprised by the way the […]
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