Tower and Town, October 2019 (view the full edition)Monisha RajeshI fell in love with train travel when I was living in India. On a Friday evening, we'd take the night train from Old Delhi to Rajasthan, waking up on a Saturday morning in the blue city of Jodhpur. We didn't travel fast, but that wasn't the point. Something that Monisha Rajesh knows all too well. The British journalist and travel writer clearly loves train travel. She's written two books, Around India in 80 Trains and now, her latest, Around the World in 80 trains, and I'm looking forward to talking to her about them both at this year's Litfest. Rajesh is dismayed by the notion that the romance of the railways is dying and is clearly on a mission to prove that slow travel will always have a place in our hearts. We live our lives at ever faster speeds, but what are we actually doing with the time that we save? As part of her epic seven-month journey around the globe, Monisha did actually go on the world's fastest train, travelling at 268mph to Shanghai Pudong International airport, but speed wasn't her goal. What interested her were the people she met along the way, the countries she saw, including North Korea, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Canada. "The richest flavour of train travel lay in the joints and hinges that held countries together, where cultures swirled together, currencies doubled up and languages overlapped," she reflects. "Invisible to others, these oases were the preserve of train travellers." Jon Stock |