Kerraway » Rail journeys

Maharajas’ Express

Michael Kerr — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:09:15 +0000

My piece for the Telegraph about the Maharajas’ Express is now online. The photograph below is of the camel ride into the desert that I mention in the text.

Seeing double in a bar near Jaipur

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:57:11 +0000

The barmen in India, too, are a more reflective lot than their counterparts in London. These gentlemen were serving the drinks at Dera Amer, an elephant polo camp near the city of Jaipur.

An Indian show of security

Michael Kerr — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:39:39 +0000

Back from India, and settling down to write about a trip on the Maharajas’ Express, I find myself scribbling notes such as “add ref to tighter security”. But in India, as this photo shows, even a brush with the security guards can be part of the entertainment:

By rail across the planet

Michael Kerr — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:41:54 +0000

Peter Hughes, one of the contributors to Last Call for the Dining Car, set out to make the longest continuous rail journey from Britain — 8,000 miles from Wick, in the north of Scotland, to Vladivostok, on the Russian shore of the Sea of Japan. He was hours away from finishing when he met a German railway buff who told him that there was an even longer journey: all the way to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

He could have gone further still, starting from elsewhere. According to Christian Wolmar’s newly published Blood, Iron & Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World, you can travel 10,600 miles between Algeciras in southern Spain and Ho Chi Minh City. That is “the longest possible continuous journey by rail”. Unless, of course, you’re a railway buff who knows otherwise. . .

Last Call for the Dining Car

Michael Kerr — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:20:31 +0000

Our package on the book is now up on the Telegraph site, combining a shortened version of my introduction, a few extracts and a greatly extended playlist of songs about trains (and the tube). Thanks again for all the suggestions.

Great music for great railway journeys

Michael Kerr — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:44:01 +0000

Once a fortnight — shame it’s not more often — Laura Barton writes the Hail, Hail, Rock’n'Roll column on the back page of The Guardian’s Film & Music section. Last Friday she was reflecting on what the river, the road and the railway have given to rock music.
That set me thinking about what I’d choose if I were able to add a soundtrack to Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys, which is due to be published by Aurum next week. I’ve put a few possibles on a playlist, courtesy of the wonderful site Grooveshark. Feel free to suggest more.

Great railway journeys: the migrants’ story

Michael Kerr — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:38:29 +0000

The demolition this week of “the Jungle”, the migrants’ camp near Calais, reminded me of a piece I’ve included in Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys, which is due out from Aurum on October 22.

Trawling the archives and making a choice has consumed all my free time over the past six months, which is why postings on this blog have become even less frequent than they used to be.

As you’d expect, the book has outstanding narrative travel articles on the likes of the Trans-Siberian and the Orient Express. But I’ve interpreted the phrase “great railway journey” liberally, and so I also have a report, by my late colleague David Graves, on asylum-seekers trying to steal a ride on freight trains entering the Channel Tunnel. Here’s a taster:

In the darkness, they creep like ghosts towards Britain
As nightfall descends over Sangatte, the first groups of asylum-seekers emerge from the gates of a cavernous blue warehouse. Some groups are only three or four, others 50 strong. They shuffle off towards Coquelles, past the cornfields rippling in the wind, and prepare for their nightly battle with Eurotunnel to get to Britain.
Caught in the headlights of passing cars, they tread a well-worn route. Past the neat houses on the outskirts of Coquelles, where most of the local people are preparing for bed, and onward past the village post office towards the Calais-Boulogne motorway. Under a fence, across the motorway and towards the Cité Europe shopping centre.
Beside the lights of the shopping centre, where tens of thousands of Britons shop for cheap wine, the asylum-seekers start to fan out across rutted fields and through deep culverts towards a clump of small pine trees, in which they take cover. There is an odd shout or whistle, but otherwise silence, apart from the rustling wind.
It is here that the final dash to the Eurotunnel terminal, half a mile away, is planned. Kamal, an Iraqi Kurd, tells his friends of a breach in the 22 miles of razor wire around the 1,250-acre compound. It is a small hole under the perimeter fence, just big enough to wriggle under. There is a shout in the distance. Kamal, 24, who has been travelling through Europe to the Channel for three months, whispers: “It’s the police.” Everyone stays quiet for half an hour until it is time to move again. By now it is pitch-black.
Moving as silently as possible towards the perimeter fence, the asylum-seekers ghost through the night towards the hole. It has not been discovered by Eurotunnel’s security guards patrolling the compound. One by one, the refugees slip under the coils of razor wire. Ahead of them are the railway lines and trains they hope will take them to Britain.
Kamal is travelling with three friends. They are all Kurds from Kirkuk in northern Iraq. They have suffered years of persecution from Saddam Hussein and Turkish forces. Their desperate families have raised thousands of pounds to enable their sons to start a better life in Britain. First, though, they have to get to Folkestone to claim asylum.
The plan is to wait for a slow-moving European freight train. As it approaches the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, Kamal and his friends will attempt to jump on one of the wagons. They fan out towards the tracks, trying to avoid the floodlighting Eurotunnel has installed. . .

Byron Rogers and ‘Me’: my book of the year

Michael Kerr — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:40:38 +0000

This may be premature as it’s only August, but I think I’ve read my book of the year. It’s Me: The Authorised Biography by Byron Rogers. I can’t remember when I last read anything that gave me so much pleasure or made me laugh aloud so often. There were passages, too, that moved me closer to tears than laughter – one about Rogers’s father, another about a friend who went mad and died young.
It’s immodestly titled because, the author explains, someone once tried to steal his identity and the book is his way of reclaiming it. But it’s as much about the characters Byron Rogers has encountered – first as a child in Nonconformist Wales, then as a journalist in Sheffield and London – as it is about the man himself. Among them are Mrs Jepson, curator of a freak show including The One-Eyed Pig with the Elephant’s Nose; the Last Man to See Lord Byron; Dr Crippen’s mistress; and the Prince of Wales.
Byron Rogers was still writing regularly for the Telegraph travel section when I joined it. Although we’ve spoken on the phone a few times, I don’t think we’ve ever met. His byline never appeared on a piece from overseas; he didn’t need to travel far from his front door in Northamptonshire to find something worth writing about and worth reading. He could, and did, make even the job of a railway timetable compiler into a compelling piece – as I discovered recently when combing the Telegraph archives for a book on great rail journeys; a book that, coincidentally, will be published by the company that publishes Rogers.
He hasn’t written for the Telegraph in ages, and I’m not entirely sure why. The stories he wrote for our desk were never quite travel stories, and certainly never the sort of thing that could be sold in a conference soundbite, but the way they were written always made you want to read them. The same is true of Me. It’s not quite an autobiography, but who cares when it’s so well done?

The Telegraph on expenses – in 1959

Michael Kerr — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:17:25 +0000

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British railways” were dismissed by Viscount Stonehaven as “dismal Willies”.

He demanded of Lord Silkin: “Where else can you get a mattress, two pillows and clean sheets for 25 bob a night except on the railway?”
When several peers questioned the price, Lord Stonehaven explained: “Third class. I never, except when the Government is paying, go first class.”