Train travel always leads to great adventures; the countryside, like a moving picture show, unrolls itself before one's eyes. One is transported to the wild places of earth – forest, mountain, desert; and always there is the counterpoint between life within the train and life without. Train travel, being both constrictred in time and space, magnifies character, intensifies relationships, unites the disparate. Ordinary people become extra-ordinary, larger then life; and in the knowledge that they will not meet again, expansive, confiding, intimate.

A BOOK OF RAILWAY JOURNEYS is a collection of Ludovic Kennedy's favourite train-journey literature. The anthology takes us on a round-the-world tour, through 155 years of train travel. It conjures up grand old trains and historic journeys; recalls horrific wartime adventures and spectacular crashes; and dwells on the romance of rail travel – its most unlikely encounters and unexpected events.