Rail travel back on track

By ANNALISA BARBIERI

While the most popular destination for British trains seems to be the doldrums, the business of taking a European holiday by train has never been more buoyant.

Rail companies are laying lines for high-speed trains which will dramatically cut journey times. By next June, the trip from London to Marseilles will be shorter by as much as two hours. New routes from Brussels to Frankfurt, Florence to Rome, and from France deep into Spain will make independent travel by train yet more attractive.

Ian Macbeth, who runs the specialist company Great Rail Journeys (www.greatrail.com), says the interest in European rail holidays has "skyrocketed."

Three years ago, train holidays to North America made up 75 per cent of the company's business, with travel in Europe accounting for the rest.

Now, while the company still sells the same number of holidays crossing coast to coast and journeying through Canada and the United States, the European routes have overtaken them and represent the lion's share of holidays sold.

"The Eurostar line has transformed the market," he says. "Now we can take clients quickly into the heart of Europe and connect with some excellent high-speed services. It's a leisurely option for our customers to board the train at Waterloo [in London] in time for lunch, and then either take an overnight stop or board a fast train in time for supper and a sleeper journey before waking for breakfast in Madrid or Milan."

The most recent addition to the company's collection of rail trips is through Denmark and Sweden, a transport buff's delight which combines travel on a train ferry from Germany with a super-modern Swedish train and a cruise boat to Gothenburg.

Train travel not only suits our romantic notions of travelling "slowly," it also gets us out of the disagreeable tussle and bad food associated with airports and flying.

In the US, trains are essentially for tourists willing to pay more than the road or air trip for the privilege of enjoying the restaurant and observation cars and a decent sleeper.

And in the US there is really only one journey where the train is a serious alternative to flying or driving for the business traveller - between New York City and Washington DC.

Rail travel in America, almost extinct when Amtrak, a public company, came to the rescue in the 1970s, is slow but scenic. Even the journey between San Francisco and Los Angeles takes a day. In exactly the opposite arrangement to that in Britain, Amtrak owns its own trains and pays for them to run along the tracks of private railway companies. The trains are slow because freight takes precedence - you travel at 95-105 km/h on the line in America.

But sometimes the train is the only way to appreciate the landscape. Last year I made the journey on the famous Ghan from Adelaide to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia. Only on a trip by train through that endlessly hostile and magnificent scrubland and desert can one understand the Australian love and fear of the Outback.

The fact that we did not have to abandon the train and complete the journey on camels (driven by Afghans - hence the name of the route) as the early travellers did, made the trip yet sweeter. Oddly, a British company, Serco, now owns Great Southern Railways, which operates the Ghan.

Few things make me want to be rich - really stinking rich - as much as travel does. When you get a hint of what is to be seen and the ways in which you can see it, it makes you greedy.

After an eight-day trip to Canada and the US, four of those days aboard the Royal Canadian Pacific Train, life was not the same back home. Had it not been for the attentions of a loving partner I might have starved. I had become so used to being waited on hand and foot. Worse, I kept looking out of the windows, expecting heart-breaking scenery to whoosh by.

The Royal Canadian Pacific route is circular - from Calgary, through Banff, Golden, Fort Steele, Crowsnest Pass and back to Calgary - but it can be chartered to go almost anywhere.