Almost half a century since he took first long-distance train journeys, author Paul Theroux reflects on the inspiring, fast-evolving nature of rail travel
Just about 50 years ago, needing money to support my family — my novels weren’t bestsellers — I had the idea of taking the longest train trip imaginable and writing a travel book about it. I was then an alien in England, living in Catford, a seedy district in southeast London. But Catford was on a railway line.
I set off with one small bag containing clothes, a map of Asia, a copy of Thomas Cook’s International Railway Guide and some travellers’ cheques. I made it to Mashhad, travelled by bus through Afghanistan and resumed riding the rails. I was often inconvenienced, sometimes threatened, now and then harassed for bribes, occasionally laid up with food poisoning — all of this vivid detail for my narrative.
What I remarked on again and again in the more than four-month trip was the pleasure of the sleeping car. Writing on board the Khyber Mail to Lahore in Pakistan, ‘The romance associated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupboard with forward movement.
But I’ve been surprised by some of the more recent developments in travel. I rode on Chinese trains for a year and wrote Riding the Iron Rooster, but now China is connected by much cleaner and swifter trains and modernised destinations, and a traveller today could take the same trip I took in 1986-87 and produce a completely different book. I got to Tibet by a snowy road. These days there’s a train to Lhasa.
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