#traintravel

Lost photographs from a 2007 trip to Bulgaria bring back Plovdiv, Bachkovo, a global conference and a suitcase misrouted to Tirana.In 2026, while looking for photographs for a completely different blog, I found an old compact camera. I had assumed that whatever remained on it had disappeared from my life years ago, yet its memory card still contain

Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to BerlinIn 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps no

My first trip to China had all the technology I expected. The surprise was how comfortable they had made it. Shanghai had already given me a very different kind of speed: 300 kilometres per hour while floating above the track on magnetic levitation, an experience that still feels unlike almost anything else in the railway world. By the time I was

How Vivaldi, an extraordinary countertenor and a convenient flight became the beginning of my first proper journey through Poland Three hundred years before Instagram, Antonio Vivaldi wrote an aria about longing and the quiet certainty of seeing someone beloved again. “Vedrò con mio diletto” belongs to Giustino, an opera first performed in Rome i

One perfect reflection, two mountain transport systems and a ridiculously expensive day above Zermatt. There is a photograph of the Matterhorn on the wall of my office. The mountain rises almost perfectly above Riffelsee, while its reflection points downward into water so still that Switzerland appears to have arranged itself specifically for my