The Great Railway Bazaar (sort of...)

Trains have always held a fascination for me. Honestly, who would fly when there's a train available? You arrive at the station ten minutes before departure, the stations are usually in the centre of cities, you can take as much luggage as you can carry, and you can get up and walk to a dining car. Plus, if you happen to have a bottle of water on you when you pass through customs, you don't get treated as if you were about to blow up Air Force One. Reading Paul Theroux's books about travelling from London to Japan by train in the 1970s and 2000s made me wish I'd been born a few decades earlier so I could have taken a train through the Khyber Pass in Pakistan, and drunk tea from samovars on a Turkish Orient Express.

So I'm doing the next best thing, and travelling one section of his journey - from Singapore at the far south of the Asian peninsula, to the Thai/Laos border where the trains stop. It will involve 8 trains altogether, plus one flight within Laos, covering about 2,150km through four countries on trains with names like Song of the Night, Jungle Line, and the Silk Express.

Seriously. Is it possible to get more steam-age-romantic than sleeper trains through the Orient? ;)