My journey on trains is from a very young age – taking sleeper trains from Euston to Inverness. It was completely magical, because you go to sleep in industrial northern England, but then you wake up in the moors or the Cairngorms. And that really is like a type of magic, because you’re transported.
I’ve always associated trains with pleasure and holidays. One of my earlier memories is of listening to Nottingham Forest win the European Cup. I was on the sleeper train up to Scotland at the time and my dad had a bottle of champagne ready, and we popped it. Even I, aged seven or whatever I was, had a little nip of champagne. If ever anything’s going to associate joy with something, that was it. So trains were always a thing for me and it’s been really pleasurable seeing the recent rail renaissance.
Back in 2020, at Original Travel we launched a portfolio of train-only trips, and we realised you can get to an astonishing array of places in Europe within 48 hours from St Pancras. Without Eurostar, none of this happens – we simply couldn’t offer long-distance tailor-made train journeys from the UK – but that’s the magic of that engineering marvel. Now, you can jump on the train in London and be in the heart of Transylvania two mornings later, hopping off the station in Brașov, where you are half an hour away from where bears and wolves and lynx still roam.
Or you can be down in southern Andalusia and jumping on a ferry across to Tangier. Or you can be in northern Sweden, mushing a team of huskies. And then, obviously, there’s the classic route to Istanbul in four days.
If you travel with Original Travel, we supply a WIFI router or an eSIM, so if you’re on the train, you can justifiably say you’re WFT – Working From Train. It’s a good compromise, because obviously the train takes longer, but you can work onboard and then you’re saving the planet and not having to take any more holiday allowance.
And travelling by train is just so different from being on a plane. In his book The Art of Travel, philosopher Alain de Botton writes of how train journeys are at the right pace. Flight is too fast and you’re too disconnected. But on a train, you’re going at a speed where you can appreciate things. It’s hypnotic. You look out of the window and you feel connected to the landscape. He calls it a state of “train dreaming” that actually allows you to access thoughts that you can almost never have in any other scenario.
The place I most love to travel by train is Japan. First of all, Original Travel can book this wonderful thing called the Japan Rail Pass. Even if you’re travelling in nine months’ time, the ticket says what time the train arrives, what platform it will arrive on, and where you have to stand on that platform to get into the right carriage for your seats. Compare that with a London station where you get one minute’s notice of the platform.
Train travel has so many quintessential Japanese moments. If you’re on a Shinkansen (bullet train), as it slowly starts to pull out of the station, all the staff on the platform stop what they’re doing and bow to the train. Then on board the waiters bow as they enter each carriage.
These bullet trains are astonishing. The fastest travel at 200 miles an hour, the whole length of the country, and most have gobsmacking views a lot of the way. A top tip is to sit on the right if you’re going from Tokyo to Kyoto, because you have this incredible view of Mount Fuji, perfectly framed by the window.
Another lovely touch is ekiben, lunch boxes you can buy at every station – eki means station and ben is short for bento. These boxes are very particular to each region around Japan and contain different produce, different specialities. Some of them are suitably weird. I had one once that had amazing wagyu beef in a cow-shaped box, and when you opened it, it mooed. You can buy them on the train or at the station and there are thousands of options. Even if you’re in some random rural station, there’ll be a vending machine selling them.
But though ekibens are great, the stations also all have these extraordinary food halls. In the one below the station at Hiroshima, for example, there are stalls selling these huge and delicious fried oysters and amazing okonomiyaki savoury pancakes. You really can have some of the best food experiences in Japanese stations. It’s not swanky Michelin star quality, but the Japanese do street food really, really well.
As well as the high-speed trains, there are also little putt-putt trains off the bullet-train network. This is where you have an amazing journey up into the mountains. I’ve always thought that life on a train is a kind of microcosm of a place, so while being on a train in Japan is getting you from A to B, you’re also getting a glimpse of the country that you might not see anywhere else.
The Japanese were the first to really nail train travel. They pioneered the idea of an extensive high-speed rail network in the 1960s, because it’s just such an elongated land mass. From Hokkaido in the north down to the bottom of Kyushu, you can now pretty much get the whole way on bullet trains. In 72 hours, you can go from top to bottom. Okinawa is still a flight away, but the network spreads the whole way. You can even get to South Korea, because there’s a ferry from Fukuoka.
Train travel in Japan still feels like a real adventure. I spent quite a lot of time in Kyushu, which is the bottom of the main islands, and though this was 20 years ago, I think it’s much the same today. I was pottering around Kyushu on little trains and you’d find yourself at a station in the middle of nowhere with no one there, not even a ticket office, and none of the signs in English. But you’d somehow get where you wanted to eventually.
There are now English signs in all the main train stations, of course, but I would say that if there’s a country on the planet where you benefit most from using a travel company, it’s Japan. We’re there to hold your hand as much or as little as you want, because Japan can be quite bewildering, mainly because it’s big, and there are a lot of people. Tokyo is a megacity with 38 million people. So Original Travel has a team on the ground in Japan – as we do in every country we offer.
It’s particularly useful in Japan because of the language barrier and the alien nature of much of the culture. We have clued-up local concierges in every country, and they’re on call 24/7. We know what works and what doesn’t. So if you want to travel around the country by train, we can put the itinerary together, book the travel, the hotels, organise excursions, restaurants, whatever, and always be at the end of the phone if you need us.
Peter Howarth has been the style director of British GQ and the editor of Arena, British Esquire and Man About Town. He is the co-founder and CEO of London creative agency SHOW and managing director of Secret Trips
