The World Commuter – Great Journeys by Train

Review by Philip Blazdell

On paper, this book seems like a wonderful idea. Take one exceptionally brave ex-war hero, issue him with a fist full of railway tickets and send him out into the world for a lifetime of railway travel. It's almost an idiot-proof formula and one which should excite both railway buffs and travellers alike. However, this book, like pretty much most of the UK's rolling stock, fails to leave the station on time and when it does finally depart it proceeds at such a pedestrian pace as to make one wonder why they didn't walk instead.

The first chapter, which could stand against any of the greats of modern travel writing, tells of his thrilling, and somewhat comical escape from a POW camp on a Nazi train bound for the Russian border. This, he says, with a hint of glee, gave him a love for trains and fired up his life-long passion for railway travel. The next chapters deal with his subsequent peacetime exploits, namely the heart-rending attempts to rescue the woman he loves from behind the Iron Curtain, and reflect his apparent disregard for authority or his own safety. These stories are a real boy's own adventure stories and its hard not to both enjoy them and ponder the length a man will go to, e.g. crawling over a mine field, to steal one kiss from his sweet-heart. Describing these adventures he writes with a fluency and degree of compassion which is missing from the more mundane 'I went here by train' type traveller's tales.

The subsequent tales which cover his trips on trains in places as diverse as East Africa, where he manages to get arrested in the Ugandan coup, India, South America, North Korea and even around the UK are largely stolid and tedious affairs which are bogged down with far too much railway detail and trivia. The reader may have a casual interest in the gauge of the track of the correct way of stoking a steam engine but Portway seems to take masochistic delight in bombarding the reader with an endless stream of hardcore railway trivia (to be fair this is largely a book about trains and not really one about travel so we much forgive the author a little). Time and time again I found myself wishing that Portway had sketched more about the lives of the people he met, spoke with or even those who arrested him. The reader wants to know about life for the average North Korean peasant or the cleaner on the Trans Siberian because these are things which can only be learned through experience and not be thumbing a railway repair manual.

Portway may be indeed a courteous, well-read and convivial traveller and he may well be embarking on some great journeys by train but he largely fails to bring them to life. Compared which much of his other writing this book is tragically disappointing.

• The World Commuter – Great Journeys by Train by Christopher Portway