This look interesting. Carline Eden has described trip across Poland on a restored old train…You can read about it here, https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2026/jun/02/nostalgic-ride-communist-era-train-poland
I’m intrigued by the forward-facing style of this retro trip…
I was recently given a small group of colour slides of French Railways from about 1960. They look as though they were part of an educational presentation, for staff inductions maybe, that describe the idea of progress and development on the railway. There are images of various trains, also of control systems and of passengers…
I’ll be posting more of these in due course.
The BBC iplayer is showing this early work by dramatist Stephen Poliakoff. The story is set on a cross-European railway service. The Ost-West express was a once-a-week service that connected Ostend (Belgium) with various cities across Europe. The train was made up so that every carriage ended up at a different place. The train was re-arranged at Aachen (Germany) so that it split between routes to toward Scandinavia to the North; straight on toward Berlin (East and West Germany) and to Moscow, and east towards Vienna (Austria) etc.
We took this train in 1988 to visit my parents, who were living in Warsaw (Poland). On the return trip we travelled in a Russian carriage, complete with bunks and a samovar tea-urn. Our journey, although not as eventful as that described by Poliakoff, was certainly a railway adventure in the old-style – the transition into East Germany (only a few years from collapse) was dramatic. Travelling through the German industrial Ruhr, at night, was amazing.
I posted before about this train ride.
The Guardian ran a piece about the how Indian railways are proposing to replace the historic jacket styl3w of their employees.
