Tales Of Travels And Trains

Jim Nicholls takes readers on a journey like no other. Visit places as remote as the Zulu battlefields in South Africa, learn about an inventor who made the first heavier-than-air flight before the Wright brothers, and take in an Easter church service in a small Portuguese town. All this and more are held together by tales of trains ranging from a tiny rail motor in the Queensland outback to a wild ride in Borneo. Experience Switzerland and America from the windows of a train. Train travel opens a window on the world, allowing a visual eavesdropping and intrusion into a country’s backyard that, if done in any other form, would probably result in arrest. Trains have it all, they convert the journey into the adventure. Real people travel on trains. Discussing with a young girl from New Zealand how one meets interesting and friendly people on such journeys, she neatly summed it up: ‘Yeah, how many nice people do you ever meet on an aeroplane?’

The author shares her adventures of traveling by train throughout the world.

"Bewes' breezy prose makes him a pleasant traveling companion ... he clearly knows Switzerland inside and out." - The Spectator In June 1863 an English lady set off by train on the trip of a lifetime: Thomas Cook's first Conducted Tour of Switzerland. A century and a half later, travel writer Diccon Bewes, author of the bestselling Swiss Watching, decided to go where she went and see what she saw. Guided by her diary, he followed the same route to discover how much had changed and how much hadn't. She went in search of adventure, he went in search of her, and found far more than he expected. Slow Train to Switzerland is the captivating account of two trips through the Alps: hers glimpsing the future of travel, his revisiting its past. Together they make a journey to remember. This is a tale of trains and tourists, of the British and the Swiss, of a Victorian traveller and a modern-day Englishman abroad. It is the story of a tour that changed both Switzerland and the world of travel forever.

Travel Tales: Trains - Terror on the Rails: Is the next book in line of relatively shorter-take samplers in my True Travel Tales book series. It's a collection of some scary close calls on passenger or freight trains while plying some of the World's most famous railways and barely managing in some instances to escape from being robbed or even harmed. Train Stories is a collection of some fearful close calls that can and do happen to world rail travelers on occasion. Mostly these will never happen to you but if they do, you may get to experience some real, raw fear including sometimes even fear for your own life on some very unsettling occasions that can potentially pop up now and again to any of us rail travelers and adventurers. This collection of True Travel Tales is the place to hear about them. I hope such things don't happen to you, but if they do, I hope you'll manage to escape and overcome. Hopefully, you'll be all the wiser for reading about such things throughout these pages. Again, Trains includes some examples of bad things that occasionally happen to travelers despite their best efforts to avoid such things. But bad things of course DO happen now and again, and the best thing to do is to of course avoid them in the first place! Hah! But if we cannot, we should certainly at least do our best to escape them. While there is no easy, simple laundry list of failsafe rail traveling strategies for always staying safe and surviving each potentially dangerous situation that may arise in your travels on the rails, there are, nevertheless, meaningful takeaway strategies to be learned from the numerous examples presented in this book that will enable one to develop and keep in mind ways to enhance personal safety and reduce the risks of potentially dangerous outcomes at times in your travel on the World's railroads. While the tales in Trains are of course not all strictly about life and death and/or robbery situations, many are doubtless about difficult, embarrassing, and otherwise potentially annoying nuisance situations that we all would do very well to do without in the first place. The scope and variety of close calls and ultimate escapes in Trains - Terror on the Rails may very well surprise you and cause you a good laugh now and again as well. Some are quite funny, like, for example, the story of soiled clothing so very badly in need of laundering that traveled over and over again throughout the rails of France. The extreme close-call adventures may never happen to you, but reading about them in this particular book in my True Travel Tales series, may give you pause: who knows? Maybe you'll never, be followed, stalked, chased, or intimidated at all in the first place or maybe in the next instance throughout your travels on the rails. Sure, you'll read stories in this book that will alert you to situations that may never even have occurred to you in the first place. But if you avoid even one potentially new (to you) travel danger by reading this book, then I will have accomplished a very useful purpose.

In this witty and entertaining collection of travel tales, an acclaimed journalist explores his obsession with trains--and what his rail journeys have taught him about culture and identity. "I've gone around the world in installments. Every trip has been a revelation. I've watched regions, nations, and continents change moods and I've met more people on trains than in forty years of airplane flights. Every train trip has been a spectacle. Trains are stages, cafés, bazaars. The only talk show that will never go off the air..." Beppe Severgnini has spent his life traveling the world, and not just because he's a journalist; he's a passionate, unflagging train buff. Off the Rails recounts some of his favorite trips across Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States, each journey bringing readers not only to a different place but to a different time, from his honeymoon on the Trans-Siberian Express (in a four-person compartment!), to a winding journey from Russia to Turkey during the last summer of communism, to a recent coast-to-coast trip with his son from Washington, D.C., to Washington State. Off the Rails is the perfect getaway for anyone with a touch of wanderlust, who dreams of escape or just likes to laugh. Filled with memorable characters and perceptive observations, it demonstrates--hilariously--what unites us. With the world in chaos and life in perpetual fast-forward, it's always the right time to hop on board with Beppe Severgnini and meet your charming, hapless, quarrelsome, romantic, shifty, quirky, endearing neighbors.

Jump on board a visual journey that will draw readers young and old into the magic of traveling by train, the sense of adventure and discovery as you look around at the world passing by. Learn about the trains like the bullet train Shinkansen and the most ambitious, daring and important train routes ever constructed. From Australia to Wales, each route is unique. Find out why as we travel the globe and explore the stories of the people who built, designed and ride the railways. Discover how these routes came to be and the impact they have had on history and people's lives today.

A middle-grade fantasy and nonstop adventure, The Train to Impossible Places by debut author P. G. Bell is as fun as it is full of heart, and the first book of a trilogy. A train that travels through impossible places. A boy trapped in a snow globe. And a girl who’s about to go on the adventure of a lifetime. The Impossible Postal Express is no ordinary train. It’s a troll-operated delivery service that runs everywhere from ocean-bottom shipwrecks, to Trollville, to space. But when this impossible train comes roaring through Suzy’s living room, her world turns upside down. After sneaking on board, Suzy suddenly finds herself Deputy Post Master aboard the train, and faced with her first delivery—to the evil Lady Crepuscula. Then, the package itself begs Suzy not to deliver him. A talking snow globe, Frederick has information Crepuscula could use to take over the entire Union of Impossible Places. But when protecting Frederick means putting her friends in danger, Suzy has to make a difficult choice—with the fate of the entire Union at stake.