Blog Action Day: No cry, no fly

It’s Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is climate change.

I’m moderately tree-huggy at home: loft insulation from recycled plastic bottles, a super-efficient wood-burning stove, and kitchen worktops made from ground-up Corona bottles collected from Soho’s bars. But maybe most significantly – while I still drive a car and leave lights on and have the house too warm sometimes – I haven’t flown in nearly three years, and I’m really not missing it.

I’ve written before about the wonders of international rail travel aided by the phenomenal Seat61.com. If you didn’t check it out before, go now. What Mark Smith has put together there is quite incredible – down to an annotated guide on how to get the best ticket price on the Spanish-language railway site. He also describes the environmental benefits of train travel over plane travel – and on the holiday I’m going on shortly, taking the overnight train to the south of Spain rather than flying, it looks like I’ll be reducing my CO2 emissions from around 300kg to more like 50kg. But for me, that’s not really the clincher. As he says at the end of the article:

I didn’t start seat61.com to avoid flying, either for environmental reasons or otherwise. I started it because overland travel by train can be so much more enjoyable and fulfilling than today’s commercialised air travel experience. In an increasingly globalised world, where every flight is the same stressful non-experience, trains and ships show you more of the country you’re visiting and its culture.

All of that is true, and more so, if you’ve got a young child. To be fair, I’ve not tried flying with him, but I know that he likes to make friends, run around, eat good food and see interesting things, and travelling by Trenhotel, Palatino or Caledonian Sleeper for example are great for small people who like to do those kinds of things.

If you’re a big flyer and haven’t tried overnight rail travel, think about giving it a go sometime. It’s awesome.

Trainspotting

Forgive me a slight deviation from the usual fare here: I’m just back from my summer holiday to Italy and wanted to share a couple of tips on travelling by train to Europe:

Tip #1: Seat61.com

The truly revolutionary thing about the internet isn’t that it enables millions of people to crowdsource information, but that it enables truly passionate, expert oddballs such as the amazing Mark Smith to publish resources like the The Man in Seat Sixty One. A former station manager and civil servant, Mark has travelled the railways of the world, documenting not only how they work but the timetables and minutiae of the experience on each train service. He gave us the idea of getting from Bromley to Umbria via Paris and Rome using a combination of five trains. Take a look at the site, and dream of 3-week treks across Asia on the Trans-Siberian railway, or getting to Botswana by train.

Tip #2: Eurostar Leisure Select

Sometimes, it’s nice not being a student any more. For an extra twenty quid on the ticket price, I really recommend upgrading to Eurostar’s Leisure Select service. You get better-than-airplane food, a lot more space, peace and quiet, and if travelling with young children, help from the steward to move you to a table by yourself, if there’s space available: Arthur loved crawling around the Eurostar cabin.

Tip #3: Travelling by train is really rather fun
You don’t have to be the rail minister to enjoy travelling by train. I’m no trainspotter, but I really loved exploring Japan via Shinkansen a couple of years ago (which reminds me: another tip) – the smoothness, reliability and buttock-clenching speed were, well, buttock-clenching. Coming back from Italy this time, we got on a sleeper train in Florence at 9pm after a day of ice creams and sightseeing, woke up to croissants and coffee as we arrived in Paris at 9am the next morning, and were home by 3pm after a leisurely return journey – it really made it part of the holiday. And in our two-berth compartment, I got to sleep in the top bunk I never had (as a only child). Bliss.