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Not long ago I rode the worst train in the world, a three-day trip (it was supposed to be two) traveling the 1,760 kilometers from Mwanza on the shore of Lake Victoria to Dar es Salaam, across the midsection of Tanzania. The sleeping cars were ancient and aromatic, but not in any positive sense. There were breakdowns and frequent delays—though nothing as serious as the recent derailment with many fatalities on this line. We ran out of water; the temperature was in the 30s.
But I am not complaining. The point I wish to make is that I had a wonderful time—not because I am a masochist but because even at its worst, train travel is more pleasurable than air travel or most road trips. And a train is the best, and sometimes the only way of traversing inhospitable hinterlands, such as the East African bush or the Ganges Plain or the desert of Xinjiang.
Rattling through the middle of China on the so-called Iron Rooster, gathering notes for my book of China travels, I used to think, "This is heaven!" I had people to talk with, a bed to sleep in, ethnic food in a dining car, plenty of room for walking up and down, a place to write and a great deal to write about. In a dramatic landscape, with congenial fellow passengers, China was inside and outside the train. These days, trains in China are even better, and there is now a new, luxury high-speed express, the T109/T110, that travels between Beijing and Shanghai: $60 first class, one way, stir-fried chicken and mapo dofu on the menu, a real rose in your compartment vase, a complimentary thermos of hot water for tea and unambiguous "no spitting" signs in the corridor.
China, Japan and India are expanding their railway lines and high-speed train services. Though ridership has declined somewhat, none of these countries could function without their railway networks (and Africa would be vastly better off if its railways were in better shape). Improved railways have made Asia more self-sufficient, less dependent on imported oil and road building, and more efficient at moving goods and people. On long-distance routes planes will usually be the better option, but for short or medium length journeys, the railway is the answer, as it has been for almost 200 years—the least stressful, the most humane form of mass transport.
If there is a great work of fiction that takes place on an airplane, I am unaware of it—what could possibly happen to such characters, passengers on a journey spent strapped into uncomfortable seats, not facing one another? But trains are another matter. Trains contain the whole of life. Many books have wonderful train scenes: not just thrillers such as Graham Greene's Stamboul Train and Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, but Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier and Ernest Hemingway's short story A Canary for One. There are classic movies in which trains figure, such as Some Like It Hot and Strangers on a Train and Brief Encounter, and many songs—especially jazz songs—evoke life on trains, since that's how jazz musicians traveled. Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.
Almost 30 years ago, for The Great Railway Bazaar, I climbed aboard a train in London with the intention of chugging across the world to Tokyo. Using the only possible route open to me—the Orient Express to Turkey, and various trains east—I got as far as Meshed, in Iran, on the border of Afghanistan. I took a bus to the Khyber Pass and resumed my journey by rail through Pakistan, India, Burma and Thailand. I got to Tokyo, and I returned to London via the Trans-Siberian Express. This trip would be simpler and possibly faster today, by a number of different routes. One of the best—impossible before—is the journey from London to Hong Kong, with a choice of itineraries: via Kazakhstan and through western China, or the Siberian route that descends through Mongolia and Beijing.
What has not altered is the atmosphere of the train, the mood of the passengers, their peculiar stories, the reminiscences inspired by the passing landscape. I remember the monsoon out the window on a train to Calcutta, the drifting snow of Hokkaido as we rolled toward Sapporo on the Cassiopeia, the waves crashing on the beach on the coast at Danang. The motion of a train, like the rocking of a cradle, tends to make the railway passenger talkative and at times even confessional. This candor is a gift to someone like me, a rider with a notebook and the ambition of writing something. That's why I did not complain on my long, hot journey through Tanzania: I arrived at my destination with a good story to tell.
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