England doesn't seem that big when you look at it on a map, but a journey from London down to the pretty southwest areas of Cornwall and Devin does take a while. Now that rail company First Great Western has revamped the London to Penzance sleeper train route, however, you don't have to waste time getting there.
This route's been there a while, but now that it's had a £2 million ($3.9 million) upgrade, Great Western is hoping to get a whole heap more passengers. A designer who's worked for Porsche has done new interiors for the trains and all fixtures, fittings and even the toilets have been completely upgraded.
The last time we traveled this route, it was neat and clean enough and very practical for saving a night's accommodation cost--now we're keen to try it again and do it in style instead. With a romantic name like the Night Riviera Sleeper, how can we go wrong?
Taking The Ghan right down through the center of Australia is a journey already reserved for those with a fair bit of time and cash, but it's one of those once-in-a-lifetime train trips that are really worth doing. The Ghan's just come up with an option that makes it even more likely you'll only do it once: The new Platinum version costs a whole lot more than the original.
Traveling by rail from Adelaide to Darwin takes two nights and three days, and starting on September 10, 2008, passengers on the Ghan will have the option of booking Platinum Service in one of 24 refurbished cabins. We're talking ultra-luxury for a train here, plus 24-hour in-cabin steward service to satisfy your every whim.
It all sounds wonderful, but it comes at a price--A$2,975 (almost $2,800) for a twin share for the two nights. Not cheap when you consider you could fly that route for a few hundred bucks and just a few hours. Either way, all you'll see in between is vast, empty desert. We'd still probably be game to try it.
Air travel in Bangkok needs some good news after all the disasters with their new Suvarnabhumi Airport. The news is that the fast Skytrain Airport Link is, uh, on track to open by December this year, making life a whole lot easier for anyone trying to get to the airport.
The airport-bound Skytrain will connect Suvarnabhumi with the almost-built City Air Terminal. The new building will have full check-in facilities where passengers will get boarding cards and check their baggage, then board a train to the airport with their baggage being loaded separately.
Fifteen minutes later, you'll be out of the city and in the airport, already checked in and ready to wait around for your boarding call. It sounds almost too relaxing to be true, so we'll wait until December to see how it holds up in reality.
When all the airlines of the world have gone bust (which should be in, like, a few more days), we'll all be able to slow down, relax and travel the world by train. One British man has already got the hang of that, and he's a quite amazing train geek usually referred to as the Man in Seat 61, after his seating preference on Eurostar trains.
We've been following his website for years, whenever we've needed in depth train travel advice, and he's also good at giving tips on making train travel on some famous routes a lot cheaper than taking the tourist train. For example, in a recent article he gave the example of South Africa's Blue Train from Cape Town to Pretoria, explaining a local route that cost less than a tenth of the fancy tourist route.
The current big news is that the Man in Seat 61 (who also has a real name, Mark Smith) has got a book deal and his official train travel bible is coming out in a couple of months. It's going to focus on European rail travel so you'll be able to get tips on that speedy Barcelona to Madrid route or perhaps more importantly to us, find out where we can get a beer along the way.
Over at HotelChatter, they're always complaining about the lack of WiFi (especially of the free kind) in hotels around the world. Their problem is they haven't considered traveling across India by luxury train, where free internet access is part of the package. At least, that is, if you ride the Golden Chariot, a luxury tourist train which started running regularly between Bangalore, Mysore and Goa last week.
The Golden Chariot is really full of amenities: there's an on-board gym with exercise bikes, weights and a treadmill. You can even get ayurvedic spa and massage treatments. It's pretty exclusive, with room for just 88 passengers. A standard trip takes a week and costs almost $3,400, which is not in everyone's budget. But there's free WiFi. We love that. We'll even cross Russia again when they get WiFi on the Trans-Siberian.
Forget the cooked history books and wartime injustices, the Japanese government prefers to bury hatchets through feats of modern engineering. Last week members of the nation's parliament proposed building an undersea railway from Japan's southernmost island to Korea's port city of Busan as a symbol of peaceful ties. It would stretch 80 miles, making it more than twice the length of the Chunnel.
If it actually gets built, the tunnel would allow passengers to travel from Tokyo to London completely by rail. Whether it would heal the bitterness between the two countries is another matter entirely.
Korea was colonized by Japan from 1910 until the end of World War II. Much of the suffering Koreans endured during that time--including the abduction and enslavement of "comfort women"--remains officially unacknowledged by Japan today. Nothing a shiny new train can't fix, right?
ˇFinalmente! After a decade of trying, the national rail company in Spain has linked Madrid and Barcelona with high-speed trains. You can now make the trip east in under three hours, tearing along at 186 mph.
The chance to avoid the airport enticed one biz traveler to give the new train route a shot:
There's not all this getting up and down, getting undressed, that you have with the plane. I have been working for two-and-a-half hours, using the phone and it is much more comfortable.
Bonus points since the train actually arrives in the city center on both ends. We found round-trip tickets on the web starting at €163 ($239). And, get this, if you're delayed for more than 30 minutes, you get a full refund. Try finding that deal on an airline.
How much does Amtrak suck? The one good thing about the train is that you don't have to get a cavity search from the TSA before boarding. But now the party's over.
Starting this week, Amtrak will start "random" searches of passengers and baggage, with a particular focus on the Northeast Corridor. Anyone who declines a search won't be allowed to board but will have his or her ticket refunded.
This is the first big security initiative that the railroad has started since September 11. We're all for keeping the rails safe, but we won't be raising a free cocktail to toast this new plan.
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by amandak
