Robert Muirhead

Making Tracks Robert Muirhead

Robert Muirhead began his love affair with trains in 1981 when he travelled from Hong Kong through China and Mongolia, across Russia and through Europe to Rotterdam, where he took a ferry to England and a final train to London. He has ridden a market train in Indonesia, and travelled from Bangkok to Singapore both in luxury and with cockroaches. He crossed Canada from west to east; and Australia from west to east on the Indian Pacific and from south to north on The Ghan. He rode the Jacobite in Scotland. He travelled to Kenya to find out about the Lunatic Express, to Dubai to learn about its old railway, to Penang to ride the funicular railway up Penang Hill, and to Malaysia to see how rail was used to build a road to the Cameron Highlands. Trains throw people intimately together on long journeys and they often open up in surprising ways, like the discussion about the value of yoga to sex on the market train in Java. The great transcontinental railway lines of Australia, Canada and Russia followed in the footsteps of daring explorers and involved epic feats of engineering, controversy and financial scandal that opened up the vast interiors of those countries. This history is part of the romance of trains. Now sit back and ride with the author on the unforgettable journeys of a lifetime. As the author puts it: "These journeys allowed me to see the endless variety of our fascinating world; to encounter new lands, people and cultures; to see what is over the hill, or around the bend in the road; to feel the wind on my face in some remote corner of the Earth; to revel in the spine-tingling wonder and beauty of the natural world."