Jim Nicholls takes readers on a journey like no other. Visit places as remote as the Zulu battlefields in South Africa, learn about an inventor who made the first heavier-than-air flight before the Wright brothers, and take in an Easter church service in a small Portuguese town.

All this and more are held together by tales of trains ranging from a tiny rail motor in the Queensland outback to a wild ride in Borneo. Experience Switzerland and America from the windows of a train.

Train travel opens a window on the world, allowing a visual eavesdropping and intrusion into a country's backyard that, if done in any other form, would probably result in arrest. Trains have it all, they convert the journey into the adventure. Real people travel on trains.

Discussing with a young girl from New Zealand how one meets interesting and friendly people on such journeys, she neatly summed it up: 'Yeah, how many nice people do you ever meet on an aeroplane?'