As someone who is wild about travel, I love the opportunity I get to ride trains. I have now ridden the rails in four continents from the high speed TGVs to the outback trains of Queensland, Australia!
For me, the Bible of train travel is a website called the Man in Seat 61. The site is run by Englishman: Mark Smith and is named after his favourite seat in the first class carriage of the Eurostar. Mark and his seat are pictured below. Mark has three ams for the site and the site performs them all brilliantly:
- it sets out to Help people who want to travel by train
- it aims to Inspire people to do something more rewarding with their travel opportunities
- it aims to turn travel into a j o u r n e y
Seat 61 provides train travel information for almost everywhere that has a train. Mark’s website has given me not only the best routes, indicative fares and times but also very useful tips. Thanks to Mark, we sailed through immigration and customs on the Thai -Cambodian border.
The site has HELPED me from Singapore to Bangkok to Cambodia and Vietnam and from London to Berlin, Cornwall, and Berlin, across Ireland, through France, Spain and Zimbabwe.
Mark’s writing has INSPIRED me to dream of train travel to the Isle of Man, and in South Africa, Russia, Iran and Turkey.
I now have a Seat 61 T shirt ready for my Burma train trip in April to remind me to enjoy my journey!
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I’m also a huge fan of The Man in Seat 61. I became familiar with the site when I was planning my dream trip of riding the train from Moscow to Beijing. And it really was a dream trip – every amazing second of it. Mark also helped me out through TripAdvisor recently when I was planning train travel in Spain. He’s very helpful and the site is an amazing resource.