Paul Theroux Reflects on Rail Travel

Just about 50 years ago, needing money to support my family — my novels weren’t bestsellers — I had the idea of taking the longest train trip imaginable and writing a travel book about it. I was then an alien in England, living in Catford, a seedy district in southeast London. But Catford was on a railway line. That meant I could walk to Catford Bridge Station, board a train to Charing Cross and thence to Victoria for the boat-train to Paris, and onward to — well, it seemed I could make it continuously all the way by train to the holy city of Mashhad in the distant northeast of Iran. After that, buses through Afghanistan, and then trains again, down the Khyber Pass into Pakistan and India and more trains eastward until the railways of Japan, and my return to Catford via the Trans-Siberian Express.