Guest post: Tom Chesshyre takes us all aboard for a midlife ride… to Istanbul and back

-by Tom Chesshyre.

You don’t have to be a backpacker on a gap year setting out to ‘find yourself’ to enjoy an Interrailing adventure in Europe. You’re still allowed a bit of self-discovery along the tracks later in life. Nothing wrong with that. Just hop on board and follow the classic route of the inaugural Orient Express in 1883 from Paris to Istanbul along the tracks taken by the great and the good during train travel’s golden age

THIS book began on a park bench in London’s Soho, not far from Stanfords’ excellent Covent Garden shop – in the company of an old university pal.

We were drinking Red Stripe lagers and discussing this and that: the state of the world (not so great), Britain (ditto), modern life in general and how we were faring with it (at the beck and call of emails and various other little electronic messages).

We had both just passed 50. We both felt the urge to ‘break free’ for a while. Circumstances (and tolerant people around us) would allow us to do this. We both enjoyed trains. We both loved Europe. And there they were: Europe’s train tracks, lying across the Channel waiting to be explored; cheaply, thanks to an Interrail promotion.

We booked month-long passes there and then, strolled to Stanfords to pick up copies of the Rail Map Europe to fine-tune the route… and Slow Trains to Istanbul was on its way.

The route we took was partially inspired by the old Orient Express service from Paris (in the ‘West’) to Istanbul (in the ‘East’) begun by the Belgian early rail impresario Georges Nagelmackers in the 1880s. We would go more or less the way he went, as described by journalists on board the inaugural 1883 ride, who were enjoying a press trip complete with free-flowing wine and sumptuous meals in a plush dining carriage.

Nothing quite so fancy for us. But that wasn’t the point. It was the spirit of adventure we sought, which the tracks – so many years on – still offered even if a direct Orient Express service no longer existed (aside from a luxury once-yearly version costing from £17,500 per passenger operated by Belmond, an upmarket tour operator).

And we also wanted something else too, less tangible perhaps: to taste a bit of what Jerome K. Jerome’s characters sought at the beginning of his comic novel Three Men in a Boat describing a jaunt along the River Thames in the 1880s: “Change of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the mental equilibrium.” At least, they hoped so.

Who would turn down a bit of that? So off we went, Two Men on a Load of Trains via Paris, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Passau, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Timisoara, Bucharest, Ruse and Sofia soaking up Europe from the carriage windows – dodging the odd rail strike – and enjoying the series of snapshots of rich cultures and histories, plus intriguing current politics, along the way.

Encounters with fellow passengers, mishaps, historical ghosts from the heady days of 1883 and later, when royalty, aristocrats, millionaire entrepreneurs (often with mistresses in adjoining compartments), ministers of state, spies, artists, actors and writers aplenty awaited down the line. But – most importantly of all – it was the freedom of the tracks that enlivened the journey.

Europe unfolded along the railways leading to the glistening waters of the Bosphorus (where my pal flew back) and I continued via Greece, a ferry to southern Italy, and trains up via Rome and Milan to Switzerland (and its beautiful lines through the Alps), the Low Countries and the Hook of Holland, plus another ferry to Harwich to complete a wobbly circle.

The distance? 4,570 miles on 55 rides, covering 16 countries in 30 days: a total of 4 days, 7 hours and 46 minutes spent on board trains along the way. The pleasures? Too many to mention, but maybe overriding them all: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and feeling Europe from the tracks. No need for the internet (except for bookings). No need for dreaded AI, nor any kind of virtual world at all.

Just the real world… seen from a carriage window.