IntroductionI have always enjoyed railway journeys. The first of which I have any recollection was in India in the mid-1930s. The Indians and the British together built up a wonderful railway system through India (which then included Pakistan) and the Indians have maintained it, expanded it and looked after it with great care. My father was in the British army in India, training the young Indian officers who would take over from the British not many years later. We had arrived by ship at Bombay, but went on by train to Ahmednagar - my father''s posting. I have little recollection of that journey, except the strange but friendly faces around us and being helped up into the train carriage and then travelling through the, to me then, strange countryside. There were other Indian train journeys during the next four years, but one of them runs into another in my memory until our last train journey in India as a family in late 1939, when we set off ''home'' for England from Bombay and days later arrived by ship at Marseilles for the journey north in a French train across France. As we went along we could hear the distant sounds of gunfire and war .

and we were thankful to reach Calais and the ship that would take us to England. We did not spend long there for my uncle, who was in the RAF, flew the government papers back from Paris over Dunkirk and arrived with them into an Oxfordshire airport, and was soon in Oxford. Where he said to our mother," You must get the children out. It cannot hold!" Before long we were on our way again, up north by train to get a ship from Liverpool to Canada and Toronto, where we were to live for the next six months or so through our first Canadian winter. From Toronto we moved to Port Hope (where the trains tooted and chuffed below us where the railway lines ran alongside Lake Ontario). Our next journeys to Goderich on Lake Huron and then through the States to Alberta and Medicine Hat, were made by car. We lived in Medicine Hat for a couple years and then went further west to British Columbia and Victoria. That journey was made by train, but, apart from saying farewell to our friends at the station, I remember little or nothing, though parts of the journey through the Rockies is spectacular.

I do remember it better when we returned east in 1946 on our way back to England. But soon we were off on our travels again. Our father was posted to Vienna. My mother and little brother would follow him there, but my sister and I would stay in England and go to boarding school, only spending holidays in Vienna - but holidays which started and ended with the train journey through war-blackened Germany and through the Russian ''zone'' of Austria to Vienna (which as anyone who has seen "The Third Man" will know was divided between the victors - the British, Americans, French and Russians. The Russians came through the train to check our passport''s and visas - in winter in fur hats, thick coats and boots, in summer in somewhat misshapen khaki ''blouses'', with sweat stains where they had pulled them down to adjust them. For the next two years, we went back and forth to Vienna by train each holiday. Usually we went in a travel-weary ''brown'' train through war-shattered Germany into Austria, but once we went in a smart ''Blue'' train via Paris . Then, apart from short train journeys on Britain''s battered but nationalised railways, we did not often use trains until as a student I went to an International Union of Students conference in Warsaw.

This time I crossed Europe by train towards the east rather than the south and could still see - in 1952 - the scars of war through countryside and cities. And then I went on the most famous train journey of all - the Trans-Siberian Railway, all the way from London''s Liverpool Street Station to Hong Kong - and back, boringly, by air. "What shall we do on such a long journey?" asked my American companion. "We can read and we can take some knitting," I suggested. But there was not much time for such pastimes - There was too much to see. Some years after that, when my home town Oxford formed a partnership with the Russian city of Perm (just this side of the Urals) I went, by train, sometimes twice a year to work with their emerging voluntary organisations - and people from Perm came to Oxford by train to see the evidence of what we had told them. The two cities are now twinned. Since then I have only - apart from a short journey by train in South Africa and journeys in Britain - made one long journey: from Toronto to Vancouver through the Canadian winter.

At night, as I lay in my cabin, I watched the train light up the trees and the piles of snow along the track. At Winnipeg we got off and walked around on the crunchy snow to stretch our legs. At some point along the line, we watched a young woman and her child descend from the train in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere to be met by her husband who carried them away across a lake into the winter evening in a canoe. Since the 19th century when the iron roads began to encircle the globe, most writers have had something to say about this form of transport we have now come to love.