The Man in Seat Sixty-One has been one of my favourite travel web­sites for a few years now — it con­tains all the infor­ma­tion you could ever hope to know about train travel around the world. Along with Wik­i­Travel, this is an indis­pens­able travel web­site: you’ll never buy an out-of-date travel book again!

Many peo­ple would rather not fly, or like me, sim­ply pre­fer a more civilised, com­fort­able, inter­est­ing, adven­tur­ous, roman­tic, scenic, his­toric, excit­ing and environmentally-friendly way to travel. Trav­el­ling by train from Lon­don to Europe is really easy, but find­ing out about it (and how to book it) can be frus­trat­ingly dif­fi­cult. Most travel agents only sell flights and pack­ages. Eurostar con­cen­trates on get­ting you only as far as Paris or Brus­sels. Even the spe­cial­ist agen­cies that sell Euro­pean train tick­ets tell you to ‘con­tact them for details’ and would rather sell you a rail­pass than get you from A to B. No-one pro­vided basic train times, fares and ‘how to’ infor­ma­tion for train jour­neys from the UK to Italy, Spain, Switzer­land, Greece, Rus­sia and so on. Let alone how to reach Morocco, Tunisia, Ibiza, Cor­sica, Crete or Malta by com­bin­ing train and ship. I thought it was a gap that needed fill­ing, and that I could eas­ily fill it myself.

The Man’s absolute top travel tip?

“Never travel with­out a good book and a corkscrew…”