Last Call for the Dining Car

In an age when low-cost airlines have reduced travel to a point-to-point aerial bus service, the train can still take travelers on a genuine journey, nosing through sweeping valleys, across vertiginous viaducts, stopping at tiny halts in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. For better or worse, it brings along its own shotgun traveling community: the delightful breakfast companions chance-met in the dining car or the crazy loner with whom one faces the prospect of sharing a sleeper compartment across the Urals. Here, Michael Kerr has gone through the archives to compile a riveting anthology of all the best railway travel that has appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Here are epic forays from Wick in northernmost Scotland all the way to Vladivostok, Moscow to Peking, and on the Sunset Express across the U.S. to California. Historic events like the last day of steam in Britain and less momentous but equally emblematic experiences such as the signal failure in the Midlands, which rouses Boris Johnson's "inner McEnroe" are also highlighted. By turns hilarious and alarming, this is armchair travel at its very best and the perfect book, indeed, for a long train journey.

Michael Kerr is travel editor of the Daily Telegraph.