I’m going to note here some of the resources we’ve found useful in planning the trip.
Firstly I have to mention the remarkable Man in Seat Sixty-One website. This is run by Mark Smith, an individual rail travel enthusiast, who has collected together an enormous amount of helpful information about travelling by rail in Europe (and beyond). Continue reading
Until the other week, I’d assumed that it was completely clear that flying (particularly long-haul, but all flying to some extent) was a really Bad Thing in terms of its contribution to climate change. I’ve not studied the climate change science in much detail, but I constantly hear from those who have that flying is a major contributor of the emissions that are causing climate change. And of course that’s a major motivation for our decsion to go to Greece by train this summer.
So I was a bit taken aback to read an article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago, entitled Train can be worse for climate than plane. Could we really be hopping on a budget flight to get to Athens in just a few hours while saving the planet, our bank balances and our green credentials? Continue reading
I’ve just been to see The Age of Stupid, a very hard hitting film about climate change. It’s left me wondering, yet again, how we manage to change attitudes, and fast. I want people to read our blog here and be inspired to not fly and to go for that big train ride adventure once in a while. To show people that train journeys are not only possible, but can be even more exciting than getting the plane. Continue reading
We don’t have a car and we haven’t flown for 8 years (except when I went to Shetland for work in November, and again in May 
) We use trains a lot. I mean a lot. But I haven’t done a grand European train voyage for years.
In the summer of 1989, having spent a week on an IVS workcamp in a small village in the mountains of rural Turkey, I caught a train from Istanbul to Prague. Continue reading