Trains

While my wife, Jane, and I were on a group tour of Taiwan in May 2013, we decided to take a side trip via train to Tainan, four hours south of the country’s capital, Taipei. We knew there were several Taoist temples in Tainan.

Traveling by train was easy there. About six weeks before our trip, I ordered the train tickets for our trip to Tainan online. We picked them up at the station.

Northern Ireland is experiencing increased tourism, with fans of “Game of Thrones” arriving to visit locations where much of this popular TV series is filmed. In addition, the new Titanic Belfast museum (1 Olympic Way, Queen’s Road, Belfast) is drawing visitors in numbers well above expectations.

French national train operator SNCF discovered in May that 2,000 new trains it had ordered were built about 7½ inches wider than the older trains, making them too wide for some stations. SNCF had been given station dimensions from France’s rail operator, RFF, which had neglected to measure stations built more than 50 years ago.

Visitors to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts may ride on the narrow-gauge St. Kitts Scenic Railway (phone, from the US, 869/465-7263), built 1912-1926 to carry sugarcane from fields to mill, that is part of a 30-mile loop around the island. 

Before joining a group for a tour of Taiwan in May 2013, my wife, Jane, and I traveled independently for two days in the capital, Taipei, a city of six million people.

We found Taiwan to be a delightful, user-friendly country. All signs were in Chinese and English, the trains were fast and punctual, and the people could not have been more hospitable and helpful. 

While on a 15-day cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to Los Angeles on the Island Princess of Princess Cruises (800/774-6237), Oct. 30-Nov. 14, 2013, I signed up for two shore excursions involving trains.

• The “Panama Canal Railway” tour ($159 per person) started at the port of Fuerte Amador, Panama, following the canal, crossing over bridges and Gatun Lake and going through tunnels and dense jungle.

The Shibanxi Railway (aka Jiayang Coal Railway), an authentic, narrow-gauge steam line on which foreigners may book tickets, is located in the town of Shixi, south of Chengdu in Sichuan Province, south-central China.

Tickets are available at the station in Shixi and cost RMB5 ($0.80) for the local train or RMB50 ($8) for the tourist train with air-conditioned passenger cars. All trains are powered by any of the six steam engines that take coal and passengers from Shibanxi to Bagou, making six stops along the 20-kilometer route. 

My wife, Bonnie, and I took a month-long tour of China, Mongolia and Russia that included a 7½-hour daytime train ride from Ulan Ude, Russia, to Irkutsk, located to the west of the southern end of Lake Baikal. On Sept. 22, 2012, after finishing our organized tour, we continued on our own on the Trans-Siberian Railway from Irkutsk to Moscow, about a 70-hour trip, and flew home from there on Sept. 26.