Extra time Travel
Training days If you’re long on cash but short on ideas for Valentine’s Day this year, there is still time to organise one extravagantly overblown romantic gesture. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you a luxurious trip for two aboard the Royal Scotsman
o any one of the hundreds upon thousands of rail commuters who endure the daily pain of crawling in and out of London, the idea of spending large amounts of their hard-earned salaries on further train travel might provoke the kind of expletivefilled response a family magazine such as this simply cannot publish. You wouldn’t blame them. For all our proud heritage as the home of the locomotive, the nation that brought the world Stephenson’s Rocket, the Flying Scotsman and Thomas the Tank Engine has more recently earned itself something of a reputation as the poor relations of Europe. Soaring fares, crippling delays and apparently endless engineering works have combined to bring a network to its knees. A country of train lovers we might once have been, but the truth is that we’re seeking a fast-track divorce.
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Back on track But, for all the doom and gloom, the romance does live on – and it does so in the family of luxury Orient-Express trains now operating throughout the UK, Europe and beyond.
58 | February 10 2012 |
Perhaps most renowned as the most sumptuous setting for one of Agatha Christie’s many tales of murder, the modern-day Orient-Express offers a much more genteel experience aimed at people looking to inject a little bit of old-fashioned glamour into their travel. The classic Paris-Istanbul route of the original Orient Express (a long-distance passenger train that ran between 1883 and 2009) remains very much alive in the modern company – the six-day, five-night journey can be yours from a mere £5,380 per person – but it is to one of its sister trains that we are going to more readily direct you. Highland games A journey on the Royal Scotsman, so its website tells us, ‘is regarded as one of the world’s great travel experiences’. Now our horizons may not be the widest – the traditional Saturday noon trek from bedroom to sofa for Soccer Saturday is about as far as we often get here at Sport – but having been on board for one of the train’s two-night Highland Journey trips last
Top: authentic local entertainment is provided after dinner each evening (you don’t have to wear a kilt); Left: the cabins are beautifully furnished and proper cosy