"Anything is possible on a train," wrote Paul Theroux in the Great Railway Bazaar. For fans of great train journeys, the possibilities have just grown with the opening of a rail tunnel under the Bosphorus, the strait separating Europe from Asia.
Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared the new line would connect "London to Beijing". But the reality is more modest: currently it is a suburban railway linking both sides of Istanbul. Mark Smith, founder of website The Man in Seat 61, notes that once bits of engineering work in Turkey are finished, one could board a train at St Pancras and, after several connections, alight about ten days later in Bangladesh. He adds a grim caveat: that is if you are not assassinated by bandits in southern Iran or al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
The Bosphorus tunnel also revives a plan from the late 19th Century to build a railway between Cairo and Cape Town. Railways already exist between Nairobi and Cape Town. If Africa's northern section were built, one could hop on a train in London and, via Istanbul, Syria and Egypt, reach the Cape. Smith describes his longest journey, Moscow to Vladivostok, which takes seven days: "Even I was going a bit stir crazy by the end. There's an awful lot of birch trees."
Changing scenery and interesting company are essential for a great train journey, says Matthew Engel, author of Eleven Minutes Late. He praises Amtrak in the US, where outside the densely populated north east, few Americans use the trains. "The people who do are a little bit, sometimes very, eccentric. And enormous fun." The trains are notoriously slow — "40 plus" hours from Chicago to LA — but, as Engel puts it, "It's like being on a cruise ship except no-one is boring."
