Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper
More Great Railway Journeys from the Daily Telegraph
A second collection of enthralling accounts of the most spectacular train trips from around the world Readers will be immersed in evocative accounts of the Desert Express from Windhoek in Namibia, the stupendous Chinese feat of civil engineering that pushed a railway across the permafrost to Lhasa in Tibet, the scenic Coast Starlight train from Seattle to L.A., and a stupendous 2,000-mile trip across India, from Gujarat's parched salt flats to the lush semitropics of Assam. Following on Last Call for the Dining Car, Michael Kerr has compiled a hugely engrossing second volume of armchair travel on trains around the world, from such authors as Gavin Bell, John Betjeman, Jenny Diski, Simon Heffer, Dervla Murphy, Nicholas Shakespeare, and Alexander McCall Smith.
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Unfortunately this new compilation of train stories (A Second Telegraph book of Great Railway Journeys) fell a bit flat for me. I read it pretty slowly, a chapter at a time, but seldom more, and I found it increasingly hard to go back to each time.
The contributors are mostly unknown to me (bar 6 or so well known authors) and appear to be reporters and correspondents, and it covers a lot of the globe. Some stories are paragraphs, others run to several pages. There were a few about the Trans-Siberian and/or Trans-Mongolian which I found interesting, have travelled it (TM) a number of years ago.
There should have been enough other interesting places to keep me going. Tibet, Namibia, Cuba, the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth. Authors such as Dervla Murphy, Gavin Bell, Nicolas Shakespeare, Sandy Toksvig, Jenny Diski, Alexander McCall Smith, James May.
It may have been that there were a number of stories left over from their first book, or it might be that they cast their net further. It may be that I was not persistent enough to keep up the momentum, or that they are more targeted at the train-travel-crowd.
There was only barely enough to keep me reading, but because I did it gets 2.5 stars. I am going to have to round it down to two though!
