"A dream of trains..."

I have a love of trains. They feature in my latest book, "Slow Travels in Unsung Spain" but this Australian guy has also written and dreamt about them during lockdown...

"Sleeper trains, after suffering a decline in the first half of this decade, are making a big comeback in their European heartland after Greta Thunberg’s climate activism..."

Read more from source here.

Peter Hitchens' controversial pilgrimage to Barcelona

British journalist writing for that horror of a publication, the Daily Mail has some strong opinions about the city...

Many thanks to fine blogger Sackerson for the link.

Free rail passes for young Europeans?

[©AP Images/ European Union-EP]

"Young Europeans are on track to receive a free InterRail pass on their 18th birthday in the future. Members of the European Parliament [MEPs] discussed the proposal and overwhelmingly supported it during a debate in plenary on 4 October. 

Millions of young European have travelled throughout the continent using Interrail over the last few decades, but the pass itself can cost up to hundreds of euros.

Interrail is a pass allowing people to travel across Europe’s rail network freely. Users can use it to travel wherever they like on the continent.

Some 300,000 people use InterRail passes to travel across Europe every year.   An InterRail pass cost ranges between €20 and €480 for a month-long pass."

Read more from source here.

"Steinbeck, Scuppers and trains" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

As a child, the great American author John Steinbeck was inspired by a scene with a bird in it: a stork. He cherished a toy ‘Easter looking-egg’ which he loved to peer into through a tiny hole, seeing “a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest." 

Steinbeck had taken this setting to be pure fantasy but to his surprise saw the same thing in real life one day in Denmark.

My own young imagination, before I could even read, had been fired by books like Margaret Wise Brown’s ‘Scuppers The Sailor Dog’ with its superbly memorable illustrations by Garth Williams. I would always ask my mother to read me this story and one scene in particular is imprinted on my memory even still. I’m sure that it fed my unconscious with a deep desire to travel.

Brave Scuppers is asleep in a warm bunk bed in his cosy, wood-paneled ship’s cabin. The ship is tossing because I can see that the light is swinging from the roof and outside through the round porthole window the sea is choppy. Under his bed are his new shoes that he picked out from a shop, pictured on the previous page. Scuppers rejected a different pair as being ‘too fancy’ because they were curly at the toe ends.

This shop (where he also bought a ‘bushel’ of oranges) had palm trees outside and a woman in a veil walking by, seemingly in a hurry. I’d never seen either of those things before and didn’t know the word ‘exotic’ then but that’s what I was thinking in my forming child’s outlook. When I got to Morocco twenty five years later and saw the same curly shoes that Scuppers had passed over, I felt what must have been a similiar satisfying surprise as John Steinbeck had once enjoyed.

Travel has a way of also emboldening us because we are out of the realm of home’s familiar touches.

Consciously, my love affair with travelling on trains began just over two decades ago when my partner Paula and I spent over three months on different forms of them getting across Europe. As a child and young adult I’d barely been on a train before but there was something either in my ancestral memory or a different kind of spark that kindled a vague interest in a different sort of transport, aside from buses or planes. Maybe it was hearing Neil Diamond on TV when I was eight years old. I still recall him singing:

It's a beautiful noise

Goin' on ev'rywhere

Like the clickety-clack

Of a train on a track

It's got rhythm to spare

In this song too he poeticised the sounds of big city street as music to the ear and my budding brain was intrigued by this idea. Living in quiet suburbia where the high-pitched ‘ninga-ninga’ of summer lawn movers was the most common weekend noise, I’d never heard anything like the kind of thing in Diamond’s lyrics and his clear affection for the pulse and grind of the metropolis. It has stayed with me in the same way that thoughts on a train trip from over twenty years ago will now and then float back into memory.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2016.]

"High-speed rail beats air travel for the first time"

One of the AVE networks high-speed trains. / Mariano Cieza Moreno (EFE)

As part of my next book I plan to take trains across Spain and Catalunya this summer. Personally, I don't intend to use high-speed rail (because I prefer the slower version, when I have the time) but I am very pleased about this weeks news. Overall, train travel is far superior to air travel in my view, and is a vital part of any country's infrastructure...

"For the first time ever, high-speed rail has outpaced air travel in Spain.

Figures released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) this week show that 1.9 million people used the country's extensive AVE network in January compared with 1.8 million people who bought plane tickets.

This represents a 7.3-percent year-on-year drop for airplane travel and a 22-percent rise in high-speed rail journeys.

For the aviation sector, the number is the 28th straight month of decline, while the railway network has seen 11 back-to-back months of growth.
 
The AVE has become more popular ever since the Public Works Ministry made the decision to lower the fares in February of last year. Meanwhile, airlines have experienced a hike in taxes and a cut in their flight routes."

Source: El País, here.