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The best railway carriage views in the world are often on the slow train. My choice in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph
WHAT is the best railway carriage view in the world? I was asked this weekend to write up my choice for Telegraph Travel. Spoilt for choice, here’s my selection. The UK really does have some special railway views. Aside from my No. 1, I could have nominated the North Sea from Virgin East Coast at […]
Read More The best and the worst of railway dining car meals
THE best and the worst of railway dining car meals. On Friday I took the 13.05 Great Western Railway train to Plymouth. Slipping into the dining car I enjoyed a splendid meal of fresh dressed Cornish crab in shell, caught that day, followed by locally sourced West Country fillet steak, and chocolate pudding. (Not to […]
Read More Want to recapture the golden age of rail? Go back to Brunel, not the nightmare of British Rail
By Michael Williams IT WAS known as God’s Wonderful Railway – and with good reason. In its glory days, until the drab hand of nationalisation fell on it in 1948, the old Great Western Railway was the most admired railway in the world. It’s carriages were the most comfortable, its engines the most elegant and […]
Read More ‘Want to recapture the golden age of rail? Go back to Brunel, not British Rail.’ My article in the Daily Mail
MY ARTICLE from today’s Daily Mail: IT WAS known as God’s Wonderful Railway – and with good reason. In its glory days, until the drab hand of nationalisation fell on it in 1948, the old Great Western Railway was the most admired railway in the world. It’s carriages were the most comfortable, its engines the […]
Read More The Trains Now Departed – and the bad old days of rail nationalisation
SURELY the railways were better in the good old days. Weren’t they? All the talk about rail renationalisation under new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn somehow implies it was better in the past when British Rail was in charge. I’ve certainly argued in my new book The Trains Now Departed that there are many things wrong […]
Read More The delights of the new Borders Railway – our first new domestic main line for more than a century
IT’S a fantasy as exotic than anything dreamt up by Sir Walter Scott – Scotland’s most famous novelist, whose “Waverley” tales once gripped the imagination of the world, with their ghosts, goblins, romantic abbeys ruinous castles – and other things that go bump in the night. Here I am, waking amid expanses of crisp, starched […]
Read More The most delightful undiscovered area of Britain. How to get the best from travelling over the new Borders Railway from Edinburgh
How lovely. The story from the Independent on Sunday of my recent journey through the Scottish Borders – travelling along the new Borders Railway. http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/scottish-borders-railway-brings-a-historic-region-back-into-focus-10499752.html
Read More Follow the old money to Sea Island – the idyll of America’s Deep South
WHEN the moon comes up, loggerhead turtles will creep on to the beach to lay their eggs. Behind us, even in these baking summer months, is succulent forest, populated by radiant tropical birds, longleaf pine, and moss-hung oak, magnolia, palm and palmetto, cypress and sea myrtle and red-berried cassina. To the north and south for […]
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