Put me in the window seat of a train (facing forwards, that’s non-negotiable), and I will sit happily as the view rushes by for hours. Any train, I’m not fussy.
I particularly love passing houses and gardens, through the widening suburbs of towns and cities, when you get a glimpse of family life, the washing drying on the line, the trampoline, the abandoned bicycle. It’s incorrigibly nosy. But I can peer in. Because I used to live in a house where I was peered at. It was the prettiest pastel pink shoebox of a cottage which backed onto London Underground’s District Line. The clackety-clack of the Tube became my personal metronome. It rocked us to sleep and jolted us awake. And people snooped while I hung up the laundry too.
The idea of travelling quietly, watching the scenery switch gears and also getting to your destination is a transport dream. Some of my favourite trains are the ones that follow the coast. The Kings Cross to Edinburgh line traces the sandy shores of Northumberland, up past stout 16th-century Lindisfarne Castle out on Holy Island, skirts around Berwick-upon-Tweed and gives an iris-blast of the North Sea all the way up to Dunbar. Anyone sitting on the left-hand side of the carriage will be cursing into their coffee cup. But sit on the left from London Paddington to Cornwall, and your heart will sing as you chug along the banks of the River Exe in Devon and hug the South West Coast Path so close you can almost feel the waves lapping at the tracks.
In Sri Lanka, the train that runs from the capital Colombo down towards Galle is a three-hour gentle bone-rattler. Fans whirr ineffectually on the ceiling, but with all windows down, the sticky Indian Ocean breeze rushes in. As the city recedes, it gives way to palm groves and villages that pay no attention to the locomotives that rumble through. I stayed, years ago, in a wonderfully low-key hotel called Club Villa in Bentota where the railroad bisected the gardens. It was fantastic, the trundle and racket that carved through the middle of the lawn, right by the swimming pool. It was real life, and it wasn’t going to stop just for someone’s holiday siesta.
On my wish list forever was the Trans-Siberian railway. The enormity of it, traversing more than 9,000 kilometres of southern Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok, crossing eight time zones, completely fascinated me. Of course, it is a trip that is now impossible. Also on my list, and closer to home, though perhaps no less unobtainable, is the wildly luxurious, old-school Venice-Simplon-Orient-Express. I can hardly imagine anything more romantic than one of its routes through Europe, just for a night.
Trains are, we know, the right way to travel these days. In France, in a bid to cut carbon emissions, a government decree banned short-haul domestic flights where train alternatives took less than two and a half hours. No more Charles de Gaulle to Bordeaux. And why would anyone want to fly that anyway, when the SNCF is so great? I recently travelled from London down to Burgundy, Eurostar from Saint Pancras, then to Dijon, and then Beaune. I have driven this route before, but sitting in my top deck seat of the 13:57 from Gare de Lyon with my book and a jambon beurre baguette to munch on, I could not have been more content. Paris rolled quickly away and was replaced with vineyards and forests of oaks, horse paddocks and bucolic scenes. No interminable airport security, no unwieldy car ferry queues. Forget the destination, I am doing this for the journey.