Rajesh - AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 TRAINS: a 45,000-mile adventure

Leaning against the window, I looked up at the iron ribcage arched across the roof of St Pancras, blue sky blazing between its bones. It appeared to be rolling back, when I realised it was we who were moving. The 14.31 Eurostar to Paris hummed out of the station, and I sat back, warm spring sunshine flashing into the carriage. As London fell away, I tried to breathe in as much of the city as I could, hoping to hold it in my chest until we met again in seven months time. A long journey lay ahead, a journey that would take me around the world. Exactly five years ago to the day, Id stepped off the Charminar Express in Chennai, marking my eightieth train journey around India. With nothing but a three-month rail pass, an outdated map, and hopeless naivety, Id travelled 25,000 miles the circumference of the earth reaching the four points of the countrys geographical diamond. In between hanging from doorways, squatting on steps and snoozing on piles of laundry, Id come to understand why Indian Railways is known as the Lifeline of the Nation.

Having narrowly avoided a number of scrapes, Id sworn never to take on anything so ambitious again. Little did I know that the railways had followed me home their dust in my hair, their rhythm in my bones, their charm infused in my blood. Slowly, the symptoms began to manifest: Id linger on bridges watching freight thundering below. On warm afternoons, Id buy round-trip tickets just to sit in the window and read, and at night, Id lie awake listening to distant horns sound through the darkness. It became a sickness, one that had no cure. At least, no cure that Id find in London. I had to get back on the rails but I couldnt just pack up and leave. After returning from India Id eased back into the swing of London life, working as the subeditor at The Week magazine, and, by all accounts, the job was the stuff of dreams: I swanned in at ten oclock, and spent the day reading newspapers and drinking tea, with Coco the office dachshund asleep in my lap. In essence, I was being paid to do what most people did on a lazy Sunday. And now there was someone else to consider, my fianc Jeremy, who had proposed a few months earlier, next to a bin outside St Johns Wood tube station. Knocked out of the way mid-proposal by a group of Japanese tourists wearing waterproofs and wellies, he had asked me to marry him, in the rain, on the very spot where we had met for our first date.

Dismissing the idea of leaving, I carried on with the humdrum of daily life, suppressing the urge whenever it rose, until I finally gave up the fight: there was too much to discover on the rails, and the trains were waiting but not for long. Train travel is evolving at high speed: bullet trains are multiplying, long-distance services running out of steam. Sleeper services are being phased out, and classic routes fading away. According to economists and pessimists, the romance of the railways is dying a swift death, but I refused to believe it was true. Nowhere in the world could rival Indias railways, but I knew that every countrys network would possess a spirit of its own, it just needed a prod and a poke to unearth. Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.