Train > Articles > Luxurious Railway Journeys of the World

Not so long ago a new train service was inaugurated with due pomp and ceremony. In air-conditioned splendour the exquisitely accoutred Eastern and Oriental Express pulled out of Singapore's main station bound for Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. The twelve hundred mile journey through some of the most spectacular scenery in Asia takes two nights and one day and follows the old rail line up the Malay Peninsular, along that narrow neck of land between the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Thailand before reaching its destination, Bangkok, on the banks of the great Chao Phraya river. En route the Eastern and Oriental Express travels past jungle-bound kampong villages, steaming rainforest and old colonial rubber plantations, an altogether different view from its observation car to the French vineyards, Swiss lakes and alpine scenery enjoyed by passengers on its European cousin, the Venice Simplon Orient Express.

But no less memorable for that. The view may be different but the style and the opulence are the same. The Eastern and Oriental's twenty-two sleeping, restaurant and bar cars are easily as sumptuous as the restored pullmans of the Venice Simplon Orient Express, with their liveried staff and plumply upholstered armchairs, their gleaming marquetry and luxuriously appointed cabins, each with its own private shower and toilet facilities. It is a deliberately sought-after style which vividly recalls that great, grand age of steam travel when this new train’s predecessor pounded its way across Europe from Paris to Istanbul.

What is remarkable in this supersonic age of diminished distances, when you can fly from Singapore to Bangkok in a matter of hours, is that the magic and romance of traditional rail travel should still endure, still seduce. And while few of the remaining great train journeys of the world can match the last-word luxury of the Venice-Simplon and Eastern and Oriental Expresses, there are still a surprisingly large number of routes where you can sit back in comfort and watch the world roll past your window. Just so long as you’re not in a hurry. For when you take a train today, you take it for the journey rather than the destination.

Possibly the closest approximation to the two Orient Express services, in terms of Belle Epoque style, is the Al-Andalus Express which leaves Madrid's Estacion de Atocha on a four-day journey through the cotton fields and orange groves of southern Spain. Calling at Seville, Cordoba and Granada, with a winter timetable that includes El Escorial, Avila, Salamanca, Segovia and Toledo, the Al-Andalus comprises fourteen cream and brown liveried pullmans carefully furnished and expertly renovated to recreate the spirit of the Twenties.

Despite the name, however, it would be misleading to think of the Al-Andalus as an Express, for its pace is never more than a leisurely excursion through the sunburnt landscapes of Andalucia, a swaying, point-rattling ride down the centuries of Spanish and Moorish history. While the Al-Andalus pants and steams and hisses at each of its various stops, as though recovering from its efforts and gathering its strength, passengers are free to explore the ancient cities it passes through. When you’ve seen all you need to, it's all aboard, and settle back for the next section of the journey.

That same sense of unhurried ease attaches itself to India's opulent Palace on Wheels. Every Wednesday, from October to April, the Palace on Wheels departs from Delhi's swarming, seething main station (sometimes it seems as though India's entire population crowds onto the station's platforms), drawn by a magnificent 1920s steam locomotive called the Desert Queen. For seven days the Desert Queen chugs and shrieks and whistles her way through Rajasthan, hauling her twenty immaculately restored coaches along the dusty edges of the Thar desert, past ancient stone fortresses like Jaisalmer and Jodhpur and the grand palaces of Udaipur and Jaipur, before winding back to the capital by way of the Taj Mahal.

Living up to its name, the Palace on Wheels is appropriately palatial with fittings of silk and velvet, etched and bevelled glass, and exquisite Moghul detailing. The train also provides an Orient Express-style level of service with two colourfully turbanned and liveried stewards for every carriage ready to do your bidding - whether it's a request for extra pillows, a late night brandy, or to act as escorts to and from the dining or bar cars, clearing a path through the beggars and hucksters and tiffin wallahs who pack the platforms of country stations. Unlike most trains, there are no connecting corridors on the Palace on Wheels; if you're having a drink in the club carriage or dining in the restaurant car you must stay there until the next stop before returning to your compartment.

In much the same way that The Palace on Wheels was once the private railway system of an Indian maharajah, Russia's newly inaugurated Bolshoi Express was originally intended for, and used by, high-ranking communist apparatchiks. Pulled by powerful steam locomotives emblazoned with red stars and fitted with obligatory"cow-catchers" and snow-ploughs, the sixteen carriages that make up the Bolshoi Express were first commissioned in the 1950s and meticulously restored in 1990. Nearly half-a-mile long and ten feet wide, thanks to the broad gauge of the track, these handsomely-proportioned carriages, with their maroon coachwork and gleaming brass fittings, have plush and comfortably-appointed interiors and a surprisingly faultless service provided by an attentive and grey-liveried staff.

Depending on the time of year, you can ride from St Petersburg to Tashkent, a fourteen day, three thousand mile journey from the Baltic to the Afghan border, or tour the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Or from Moscow you can choose one of two ten-day excursions, the first around the so-called Golden Ring through cities like Vologda, Kostroma, Ivanova and Vladimir, the 13th century capital of Russia, the second up to a wintry Archangel on the White Sea.

Of course not all train journeys are mere holiday excursions laid on for the benefit of time-rich tourists. The Trans-Siberian Railway, for instance, is a work-horse of a train that regularly pounds its way around nearly a quarter of the globe. From Yaroslavl Station in the centre of Moscow to the echoing halls of Vladivostok's main terminus, it travels more than five and a half thousand miles across the vastness of Siberia, even branching off into Mongolia on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, and past the Great Wall of China to Beijing on the Trans-Manchurian Railway. In only six days it carries an assortment of passengers and goods through no less than seven time zones and across nearly one hundred degrees of latitude.

When four of the original Trans-Siberian carriages were shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, visitors were invited to dine in the mahogany-panelled restaurant car while a painted panorama rolled past them. No painting, however, can match the real thing: through silver-barked birch forests, endless tundra, and in winter past snow-covered mountains and frozen lakes, this legendary train grinds its way along tracks that were laid down more than a century ago despite the best attentions of bandits, bubonic plague and the occasional Amur tiger intent on carrying off some unfortunate worker.

Equally workmanlike but altogether more luxurious is South Africa's celebrated Blue Train, named after the famous overnight express that linked Paris with the Cote d'Azur. First introduced in 1903 and known then as the Union Limited, the service was originally intended to link the cities of the Transvaal with Cape Town and the old Union Castle mail ships that sailed between England and South Africa. Renamed the Blue Train in 1939 and equipped with brand new rolling stock that included sumptuously-appointed dining, sleeping and observation cars, the Blue Train still provides a regular de luxe passenger service between Cape Town and Pretoria, taking twenty six hours to make the thousand mile journey.

Like the Al-Andalus, the Blue Train's route is an historic one. Leaving Cape Town at midday, it winds its way through the orchards and vineyards of the Cape Province before climbing up into the high veldt country of the Great Karroo, an arid semi-desert that the Hottentots called the "Land of Thirst". It is a route that follows in the footsteps - or more precisely the ox-cart tracks - of the original Dutch settlers who set out on their Great Trek in the 1830s, fleeing the rule of the British Cape colonials, to establish their own townships of Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Along the way the Blue Train crosses the mighty Orange River, the historic dividing line between Boer country and the old Cape colony, and at dawn or dusk (depending on which direction you’re travelling), it will stop for twenty-five minutes at a place called Kimberley. It was here, in 1869, that those early pioneers discovered diamonds, and the open-pit mine they dug at Kimberley became one of the richest seams on earth. It was this staggering mineral wealth that provided Cecil Rhodes with the funds he needed to build a thousand-mile railroad north from here to the great Zambezi river through the country he founded called Rhodesia.

Today it would take more than diamonds and the dreams of one man to build a new railway. Fortunately, for those who care to and with the time to spare, there are still tracks enough, rolling stock and steel wheels to travel back in time and see the world as our forefathers saw it.

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