Train Travel

A night train moving across China is perhaps travel at its best.

An older peasant woman tried to elbow past me and usurp my position in the line leading into the train carriage. I stopped her short with a stiff arm and some sharp words. Around a hundred anxious passengers were in line behind us and I wasn’t going to let them trample me. But as soon [...]

Chinese new high-speed rail network sets the bar for ground transportation, other countries try to play catch-up.

Hongqiao station is the largest train station in Asia and Shanghai’s new hub for high speed train transport.

Train numbers in China tell what direction a train is traveling in and how fast it goes. This article shows how.

Unless on a very long journey, when a train ticket vendor asks me what class I want to ride in I say one thing without hesitation: “The cheapest you have.” In China, this often means hard seat class. Riding hard seat in China is not as bad as it may sound — you’re not being [...]

A big claim.

It was late summer in the southern hemisphere and I had been traveling in Australia for only two weeks when a friend told me about IronFest. Nothing sounded better to me than jousting, battle reenactments and blacksmithing in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney, so I was off. I bid my friends in [...]

Amtrak is where it’s at.