This isn’t new, but it’s certainly entertaining and deserves a wider audience. The quiet carriage on the train isn’t a refuge, says the author Geoff Dyer; it’s “a crime scene waiting to happen”.  

There’s a lovely line on life as a train journey in a new book about happiness by the Irish writer Michael Foley. According to a review in The Observer yesterday, that journey isn’t aboard “a gleaming Orient Express… into exotic glamour, adventure and excitement”. Instead, we travel on “a rusty old English branch line, puffing [...]

I rarely do more than glance at the in-flight safety video, but on my first flight with TAP, the Portuguese airline, I found myself glued to it. Halfway through, TAP turns public information into a mini-soap, complete with quarrelling pensioners, a hyperactive business traveller, and a thwarted would-be smoker. See below. The flight, to Madeira [...]

Has the role of the aircraft sick bag in popular culture been unjustly neglected by academia? I returned this morning from the conference in Madeira of the Association of Independent Tour Operators. En route, I read an interview in El País with that great protest singer Pete Seeger, who talks of how Woody Guthrie, one [...]

Next time you find yourself complaining that your journey into work was “a nightmare” because of a few signal failures, think about the poor souls on the “Train of Death” (also known as “The Beast”), which thousands of poor people ride through Mexico in the hope of realising their “American dream”. For many, the journey [...]

What a prescient title my publisher Graham Coster came up with for the Telegraph anthology of great railway journeys we published in 2009. Tonight it really will be “Last call for the dining car” when Britain’s only remaining full-scale restaurant car service comes to an end on the King’s Cross-to-Leeds run. It’s a shame but [...]

My wife was sent a link to the trailer for TT3D: Closer to the Edge, and immediately wanted to see the film. I watched the trailer a while later and wasn’t convinced, but I went with her. I’m convinced now. It’s a wonderful film, a pillion ride into the mind of the motorcyclist. And I [...]

A recent piece in The New York Times on rediscovering the romance of the window seat on planes has prompted a flood of window-seat photographs from readers. Which reminds me: flying isn’t something I’ve enjoyed much for a long time. Aloft by William Langewiesche, recently reissued as a Penguin classic, restores some of the wonder [...]

It was instructive to be in India in the run-up to the  anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I was attending the conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, in Cochin, Kerala. On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who [...]

The Daily Telegraph had a story today about “the giant private train set” kept by Kim Jong-il, the paranoid and aircraft-fearing leader of North Korea. It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the [...]