Sunday, 4 October 2015

Last Call for the Dinning Car Edited by Michael Kerr

Buy it from Hive.co.uk and support local booksellers 


I got this book out the library along with a number of guidebooks when we were planning our trip to Canada, so probably sometime in 2012, and have been dipping into it from time to time over the intervening years.

It is a miscellany of railway related writing that has appeared in the Telegraph over a century or more.

Some are charming snippets, comments on a particular historical moment in railway history.

Some are more traditional travelogues – but for example the pairing of different eras of journeys on the Orient Express, when it had gone to seed and in its current revival, play against each other for added interest.

While some of the more exotic journeys sound great adventures, such a crossing the Andes, most failed the test of suitability for holidays. Many had a little too much in common with Griff Rhys Jones' recent programmes “Africa by train” for which a better subtitle would have been “the continent's best rail-replacement bus journeys”!

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