Category: Surface travelPage 2 of 3
Posts about the joys of keeping as close to the earth’s surface as possible while travelling
You can get from London to Crete by land and sea but it takes about four days each way. I was due there for a four-day meeting and…
19/3/18 Derive #2 Location: City of London Context: preparation for my talk ‘Circling the Square‘ 0:00:00 Moorgate and London Wall. Once solid-looking stonewalls are now façades pinned in…
Last night I have a talk at the first ever City of London Showoff called Circling the Square. The event was put on by the City Centre, a…
Overview Six trains and one monorail Leisure 709km £130 Today I take my journey home from Münster to London via a different route from my way out. Outbound…
Overview London – Harwich – Hook of Holland – Den Haag – Enschede – Münster Six trains, two buses and a ferry. Leisure 365 miles. £90. When I…
Ever since I saw my first one zoom past as a boy I’ve loved TGVs. In January I travelled from one side of France to the other and…
I love packing. But until four years ago, I hated it. I would put off packing my bags, leave it to the last minute, forget things, bring the…
Every time I go to the woods I find new insight or inspiration that I can use in my teaching. Today’s comes from deer tracks. I know the…
For my first time on stage at Science Showoff back in November 2011, I decided to recreate the famous public demonstration conducted by engineer Benjamin Baker to reassure…
I know it is not often that you hear people say this, but I do really like Euston station – from an interpreted transport perspective, it is a…
Pushing a pram, as is my new daily habit, has made me much more aware of the relative accessibility or inaccessibility of London. Today I decided the best…
This week we took our 5-month old by Eurostar to Paris. The experience of travelling with a baby is adding a new perspective to my journeys. Long-distance train…
This is only the second time I have taken a night train as part of a business trip. As we slip into Edinburgh in the early morning, having…
I feel like a bit of a wally standing here in the rain at Clapham High Street Overground station. There are many shorter ways to get me home, which…
Last year for Cloud Cuckoo Land and this year for Shambala, I’ve taken the train most of the way, and covered the final leg by bike. Often the…
For all the publicity in London about the opening of the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, passengers leaving Paris on its inaugural day wouldn’t have been any…
Last Tuesday evening I bid farewell to Waterloo International, the last day that Eurostar will serve this station before it transfers to St Pancras ‘in the (other) heart…
Every omelette* has a story to tell. The first omelette was in Istanbul. It was on a Wednesday morning, having just arrived by train by a round about…
Since my last post, I have been rather busy! The lack of posts on this blog since then can be attributed in part to the large amount of…
Going home from work is always such a pleasure when it’s such a beautiful day… On my way home through Gare de Lyon I saw three stilt walkers…
This Monday I did “le pont”, which is when French employers give their staff an extra day off between the weekend and a bank holiday, in this case,…
It’s not just about the trains. It’s about the track, the gentle curves, the tunnels, the soaring bridges… click this link to fly the route of the TGV…
Choose life, choose reducing your carbon footprint, choose highspeed train travel instead of flying Thank you SNCF, for making trainspotting cool, at least for a day. Yesterday, a…
As part of the preparations for the eagerly anticipated TGV Est-Européen, which will operate from June 10th between Paris and Strasbourg, the SNCF are hoping to break their…
Thursday 2nd November – Friday 3rd November The platform at Sofia station from which my train was due to leave was lit only by the dingy light coming…
Thursday 2nd November Regular readers of this blog may be either frustrated that I have not posted any entries recently. Or thy may think I got lost in…
Wednesday 1st Novemeber – Thursday 2nd November Half an hour later than expected the Belgrade Sofia express night train creaked its way out of the station in the…
Wednesday 1st November Having decided upon taking a detour via Bulgaria, I embarked upon finding out some basics about the country before my train that evening. My first…
Tuesday 31st I first went to Belgrade in this summer enroute to Greece with Mary so I already knew bearings in the city. After a very agreeable lie…
Monday 30th October I must have slept well in my reclining seat as I completely slept through Munich and Saltzburg, although I had been aware of many different…