published on 17 January 2013
Cast back fifty years and St Pancras station in London had plenty of trains to stir the imagination. The Palatine still ran from St Pancras to Miller’s Dale and The Waverley to Hawick. But during the 1980s and 1990s, St Pancras was a dull place for devotees of interesting trains. It’s hard to get excited about the slow train to Luton or the semi-fast to Leicester. This most august of London termini fell into deep decline.
published on 28 December 2012
Sattuma is a popular folk band from Petrozavodsk in Russian Karelia. The group includes, as a standard part of its repertoire, a song about the express train from Petrozavodsk to Joensuu in Finland. Great song, but no regular train plies the route described in the lyrics. Sattuma’s song about the train from Petrozavodsk to Joensuu has been wishful thinking - until this week.
published on 24 December 2012
Here is a thought to ponder as you make those final preparations for Christmas. In Berlin extra trains will run tonight on the city’s rail networks. Switch to London, and the rail network is today beginning to shut down. No trains will run anywhere in Britain on Christmas Day — and all but a handful of routes (in and around London and Glasgow) will be train-less on 26 December.
published on 11 December 2012
For many years, Venice enjoyed a direct Moscow train service, but it was unhappily axed last December — a victim of the demise of the nightly Budapest to Venice service which carried the through carriages from Moscow. But the Moscow to Venice itinerary could well return, a result of the re-routing of the existing Moscow to Nice train, which now follows a quite different route from Vienna to Verona.
published on 11 December 2012
Last weekend, a raft of changes was introduced to train services from Moscow to France, the Netherlands and elsewhere in western Europe. The December 2012 issue of the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable gives full details of all these changes. We here pick up some key changes to train 21JA from Moscow.
published on 29 November 2012
The new rail timetables that start in Britain on 9 December 2012 bring much improved services on the East Suffolk Line from Lowestoft to Ipswich and a big expansion of the London Overground network. But we think the most significant innovation to long-distance services in Britain in the new schedules comes in the competitive London to West Midlands market — evidence, perhaps, that a little competition on the rails can be very good for the consumer. Not for the first time, it is Chiltern Railways who are making the running.
