In the 80s my then wife and I spent a month interrailing across the continent. No AirBNB, No Booking and not a lot of money. Spag Bol was usually the cheapest cooked meal and we camped.
A neighbour - retired teacher has just set off with a friend passes in hand. We agreed it was likely to be rather more comfortable second time around. I doubt it will be as exciting though. When I did my trip I hadn’t visited many countries at all. I’ve still hardly seen anything of Scandinavia. A rail trip would be interesting.
Do any SF members have any fond or painful memories of interrailing or other train journeys?
Love train journeys and wandered happily around europe as a youngster, with many memories of sleeping on benches in train stations. The police in Bordeaux were very disagreeable. The most memorable moments were further afield tho’.
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travelling across china with my mother in 1977, the year after Mao died (my father refused to go with her), and the overnight train from Beijing to Chongqing where I was woken by noise to find my mum in next sleeping compartment drinking gin and fanta orange out of a mug and singing broadway songs with her new found friends. My mum was a very upright, laced up type!
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the overnight train from Saigon/Hu Chi Minh to Hanoi playing cards most of the night with very loud Vietnamese and making the big mistake of having some of the soup that was brought round in plastic pails. God was I ill the next day! But I did win a certain amount at cards so it evened out.
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My first wife and I honeymooned in India and Nepal. After backpacking around, we took a 1st class a/c sleeper from Delhi towards Varanasi. It was very luxurious. We had to get off in the middle of nowhere to change to a train heading in the direction of the India Nepal border. Pigs and rats were wondering up and down the rails as we waited for the connection. At the border we jumped on the Katmandu bound bus. Sat on stools in the gangway we were told the journey was better made in the dark as otherwise we would see the burned out wrecks that had gone off the road into the ravines.
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In the Spring I used to await the publication of the NUS student travel booklet, which back in the day (before generally cheap flights) listed all the set cheap train and plane journeys that were massively discounted for students and scholars.
It’s more than fifty years since my first student train, age seventeen , London - Florence - Venice - then made my own way to Rijeka via Trieste, got an overnight boat down the coast to Split, sleeping on deck as we glided past tiny islands under the stars. Stayed in a workers’ hostel in Split then discovered through some Canadian student travellers that I could get a cheap ferry to the island of Brac and spent the next few weeks there living in a peasant’s attic with an amazing view of the Dalmatian coast, virtually free wine (‘Only frogs drink water!’) and dining off fresh tuna on the quayside every evening when the fishing fleet came in. Eventually made my way back to Rijeka, with a student train ticket back to London and ten hitched home to what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire and prepared to start life in the Upper Sixth.
Maybe that gives some idea of why I hated school!
But thanks for prompting me to recall that summer
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I love trains, my plan a couple of years ago was to get on a train in Bergerac and carry on as far as Beijing via Russia and Mongolia (rather than the Stans) alas Putin put paid to that, so I went to Gdansk instead. I want to go (ideally starting in eg Harbin and going via Shanghai) from Kunming to Hanoi for family reasons (my great-grandfather built a fair bit of it). And I still fancy the Stans.
As a student in Germany I used to go all over the place but most regularly took the sleeper to Rome then went south, lovely.
One of my favourite trains is the Khyber mail but I only know the Peshawar to Lahore bit, it had fabulous food and fascinating people. I loved the trains in India and Malaysia. Possibly the weirdest train journey I had was once in Egypt, from Cairo to Luxor with a dead body on the other side of the aisle.
The wooden and brass steam train from Damascus up into the Anti-Lebanon is beautiful and for enthusiasts there was an office of the society for recommissioning the Hijaz railway in Damascus when I lived there.
I can’t wait to be on a train again 
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What a lovely post!
You put me in mind of the opening lines of Theroux’s ‘Great Railway Bazaar’ (which I’m probably about to misquote below). Theroux went Vic Stn to Japan by train through southern Asia, and then returned via the Trans-Siberian and the former Soviet Eastern Europe.
Anyhow, the evocative quote:-
… ‘I was born within earshot of the Boston-Maine, those railway whistles are in my blood…’
I used that quote about thirty years ago (in a publication that I now can’t find) to describe the piercingly evocative whistle on Richard Sapper’s Alessi kettle whose whistles were tuned to E and C to replicate the sound of the traditional AMTrak train whistle.
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Wife and I had a couple of interesting trips on the railway in Sri Lanka. From Negombo, not a great place, to Colombo. Doors wide open, nobody riding on the top though. Coming back I was a bit concerned we might miss our station as they weren’t well signed and the train stopped very briefly. The other ride was spectacular - Ella to Badulla. At the final station I bought a couple of pastries which were wrapped in somebody’s old maths exercise book!
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I haven’t done Interrail, but when I was a young teenager one of our teachers organised a school trip to Greece - we travelled by sleeper train from Calais down to Brindisi in Italy, across on the ferry to Patras, and then to Athens - after a stay in Athens we then caught another ferry to Crete.
The train journey was an adventure in itself of course, but apart from seeing all the amazing archaeological monuments of Greece, it’s the small details I remember…
For example on the ferry from Piraeus to Heraklion in Crete we travelled in economy class, and I remember the “restaurant” had just one item on the menu - spaghetti bolognaise - and you had to pay a 30 drachma deposit on your plate and fork to make sure you gave them back!
I also remember lots of graffiti on walls supporting and opposing the fascist Junta who were in power at the time (this was the early 70s) - “Zito o Stratos” - long live the Army - and KKE for the initials of the Greek Communist Party, which was of course banned at that time.
I also vividly remember eating in a taverna in Heraklion where at the next table were a party of German tourists, oblivious to the fact that above their heads was an engraving of Cretan partisans bayonetting German paratroops!!
And a sign on the wall at the dodgem ride in Heraklion - “do not bang the cars on face”. 
That trip (and subsequent ones) was the reason I went on to study Ancient History & Archaeology at university, and formed a long-standing affection for Greece and its people.
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I was smitten on my first visit, returning to the UK to sign up for Greek lessons following the BBC book and tv series ‘Greek Language and People’ with Chris Searle. Lovely country and culture. So many wonderful memories - especially when being able to ‘get by’ in Greek was rewarded with such kindness. We attended some Greek dance lessons in Birmingham a few years ago. Some of the music was almost hypnotic.
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An obsession of mine as a tiny child (weirdo).
When I was at prep school my gerbils and I used to take the sleeper from King’s X up to Scotland or vice-versa, so nice to be woken up with a cup of tea and railway shortbread. The gerbils (Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane) travelled in a cigar box.
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Yes I was actually inspired to study Modern Greek at Uni - initially I signed up for a four year course at Birmingham combining Modern Greek with Archaeology, which would have involved a year at university in Ioannina.
However I struggled with it as I hadn’t appreciated that “Modern Greek” basically means “not Ancient Greek” and they started us off on Byzantine hymns and the Cretan epic poem “Erotokritos”, which is the Greek equivalent of Shakespeare or Chaucer! (You didn’t get on to the modern stuff like Seferis, Kazantzakis or Giannis Ritzos until the final year!)
So after 2 years I regretfully dropped the Greek and just did archaeology. I still remember enough of the language to tell a taxi driver where I want to go and to order beer and souvlaki fortunately!
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I adore that, and bought the video a long time ago in the time before YouTube!
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As a teenager, I once travelled from London to Pau by multiple trains… On every leg of the journey, I was incensed to find people sitting in my reserved seats, and even sleeping in my reserved couchette for the overnight section. On each occasion embarrassed ticket inspectors rapidly hauled out the offenders and ensured I could sit/sleep etc in my allocated seat/couchette. It wasn’t till I got to Pau to find no welcoming committee from the French family I was supposed to be staying with,that I realised to my horror, that I’d been travelling on entirely the wrong day throughout the trip. No ticket inspectors had actually checked the date (nor had I!), just the various seat numbers. They’d seen this furious teenager waving his ticket around , and just assumed I was in the right.
On the way back I was sleeping in the top bunk of a packed couchette cabin when all my money suddenly cascaded out of my money belt, across the floor. In the morning, not a single centime was missing.
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That’s a cracker of a tale and it just shows how far righteous indignation gets you when you are convinced you are in the right. 
My train tales can be summed up, 5 taken 2 missed.
When a very young clerk in a Nottingham office I was transferred to Bedford, living in digs but hitch hiking home and training back each weekend. Early winter mornings huddled by the fire in the waiting room then the multi stop crawl to Bedford in a train almost devoid of heat, followed by a 2 mile trudge, in the dark past an eerily lit but whining electronics factory in the woods, to my digs.
Later fetching up in Lahore on my way to Australia I got a train to the border. India and Pakistan were on the verge of war and there were no through trains, not only that but there was a 100 metre no man’s land which I had to walk across carrying my large suitcase, to catch the train to Delhi. On the first train, full of soldiers heading for the front, singing songs which told what they were going to do to the enemy. In the Indian train, all the soldiers were heading home on leave, but no less noisy and gung ho.
Broke and jobless in Sydney I decide that Queensland, the Sunshine State, was the place to be and waited outside the city at a place where the freight trains were slow, or waited for a signal. I scrambled on a flat car which, like the rest of the wagons, was carrying new caravans. I thought I had fallen on my feet , but they were all locked.
After some years and back working as a taxi driver in Sydney I decided I should go back to Blighty to spread the good news to family and friends to bring back to Oz with me. The idea was to take a ship to Japan and then on to Vladivostock for the Trans Siberian to Moscow. To my great regret I decided on speed rather than experience. Now it will never happen, nor with the last missing piece, which was Fran’s really. We had a little flat in the attic in Folkestone overlooking the railway crossing where she would watch the Orient Express slowly descend the hill to the harbour. The people sitting in the dimly lit carriages really inspired her to take it one day. Won’t happen.
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In the 80s my wife and I booked a flight to Faro with the intention of avoiding the Algarve which we imagined would be too touristy. We soon realised there wasn’t enough to keep us entertained on the sand spit island where we were staying. We jumped on a train for Lisbon and I sat in an open doorway for some relief from the heat and to better enjoy the views as we passed through forests of cork oak. Lisbon was very enjoyable, but the best was yet to come in the form of the narrow gauge railways running across from Spain to Porto in the north. The stations were tiny affairs often with ladies stopping traffic for the train to pass. The carriages ressembled those shown in westerns - all wooden with balconies at each end. I have fond memories sharing a bottle of wine as we admired views of the Douro valley from one such balcony. Most of these lines have long since been closed but some services still run. We loved the friendliness of the Portuguese who often would go out of their way to direct us.
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Porto and the Douro river… marvellous memories… 
Just about on topic, I guess. We are just back from Uzbekistan where we travelled quite a bit by rail. First from Tashkent eastwards through the fertile Fergana Valley to Andijan via Margilon and Kokand (it must have been marvellous in earlier times to arrive there on the ‘Silk Road’ coming out of the deserts in China). Lots to see at each place and trains always on time to the minute. Then back to Tashkent and the next day on the relatively new TGV-like train to Samarkand (not exactly the ‘Golden Road’ but only two hours in comfort instead of more than a day in the past). Samarkand to Bukhara then on to Khiva. Finally 12h trip back to Samarkand and flight back to CDG. Booking is online but you have to be quick about it as the locals use the train a lot. The booking system is still very Russian but not hard to navigate. Prices are very low and taxis to and from stations are usually less than one euro per trip. If you like trains…
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You are very brave! That would make a wondeful trip report.
We find most people in almost all countries are very helpful and friendly. What used to be called the Foreign Office in the UK had a list of countries that the FO deemed inadvisable to visit, such as North Korea, Somalia, etc. I could never understand why they did not include the most dangerous on their list, i.e. the USA. I have been twice held at gunpoint by officials in the USA, once on arrival by air in Miami, the other time at the land border at Tijuana/San Diego. In no other country have I seen a gun out of its holster and mostly not at all. I am including Iran, Syria, Libya (all before 2008), Mexico and China among another 50 or so. Bravery only arises when a person is taking a decision involving a high level of risk. Going on holiday doesn’t count.
After becoming independent in 1991 after the collapse of the USSR, Uzbekistan (UZ) used to have a President (Karimov) who had a very poor track record against his own citizens; Craig Murray was the UK ambassador who resigned in protest at UK acquiescence. But things have moved on and UZ is now definitely on the up. Not to say that there aren’t major problems of which water shortage is the greatest. B&Bs are clean, provide good food and are inexpensive in our terms. Hotels are likewise although there is some way to go in providing breakfasts. There are many restaurants in the towns and cities and their food is good. Most of the people being Muslim and washing their hands a great deal, food poisoning is not a risk. Transport is good. The weather is ,as you might expect, Central Asian, i.e. great in Spring and Autumn, but very cold and very hot at the extremes. There are two languages in common use - Uzbek uses Latin script and works week on Google Translate; Russian uses two scripts, both Cyrillic, one upper case (mostly), the other lower case (less). It’s a good idea to spend 30min learning to transliterate the upper case version at least. Most restaurants have menus with photos. The currency is the UZ som, about 15000 to the euro. There are good flights from most large French airports, often involving a change in the middle east; flight time is about 9h. We very much enjoyed our three weeks, flying in to Tashkent and out From Samarkand. Apart from the air fares, the overall cost was much the same as staying at home in the south of France.
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Sorry - Uzbek uses Latin script and works well on Google Translate.