Cam's RAIL TRAVEL blog!

I love trains.
When I was young, I grew up in a small town of a few thousand people in the fertile Lower Yangtse, exactly halfway between Nanjing and Shanghai on the main trunk line. A few miles from where I lived, there was a diesel engine factory which employed the bulk of the town population, and had its own high school, hospital and social club.
My Nan, who raised me for five years whilst my mother was a doctor in training, would walk me to the station so that I could watch the trains, making their way from all parts of China to the Paris of the Orient... a zillion migrant workers, all searching for opportunities in the great megalopolis of their electric dreams.
I loved riding on them even more than watching them. Every summer, when my mother went on leave, we would catch the train in economy class to her house to the big smoke in Nanjing where I'd also see my Granny, Grandpa, and my aunts, uncles and cousins. I would memorise every station on that line. It was a four hour journey then; the same journey now takes 45 minutes.
Since then, I've loved riding trains. I was delighted when I saw my first train in Australia: a humble Comeng EMU plying the Hurstbridge line which Mum would sometimes catch to work at Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. Sadly, a lot of lines have met their maker thanks to economic rationalism. I regret not being old enough to ride them when they were still alive. But I have also been fortunate enough to have travelled on some of the most beautiful places on the planet by train, from the Arctic Circle to southernmost New Zealand.
I love steam trains and rail preservation. I think it's important for future generations to know what trains are, in an age where everyone travels by automobile (well, in Australia anyway). And venerable steam locomotives somehow remind me of healthy and wise models of successful aging.

So join with me on a journey on the rails around the globe. See you some day on a train!