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 had [...]

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 BBC’s [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

Speaking of railways, here’s the station at Katha, in Burma, the town George Orwell turned into Kyauktada in Burmese Days. Some people on that platform had been waiting as long as 20 hours. They look a lot happier than the average British commuter.

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 [...]

This week I’ve been looking through some of the best pieces the Telegraph has published on train journeys. Among them I found one by Peter Hughes that we ran over three weeks, a treatment justified not only by the length of the journey — from Wick in Scotland to Vladivostok — but by the quality [...]

Think about this next time you’re on a plane coming into land in the US: there is such a shortage of air traffic controllers that the authorities are ”accelerating” the training of new ones, according to The New York Times. The good news: they start on a simulator — what one instructor describes as “a big Xbox”. And [...]

What’s the longest you’ve been delayed at an airport? Long enough to write a book? That’s the premise of Dear American Airlines, the debut novel of Jonathan Miles, reviewed in The New York Times by Richard Russo – though I’ve just realised you can only read that if you’re a registered user of the NY [...]