I love trains. No, really, I do. In these pages, I have written about all manner of things that move you from one place to another, including cars and scooters, buses and bikes. But as much as I obsess over transportation forms, I have not yet written about my favourite – the train.

There are many great things about trains, chief among them being that a train is a reflection of the place where it is run. Tell me how a country runs its railways, and I will tell you what that country believes about itself, because the building of a train is too long, too expensive and too public to reflect anything other than the institutions that built it. Consider Japan, where the fastest trains on Earth were built by the slowest, most deliberate people imaginable – a nation that will rake a gravel garden into symmetrically straight lines every morning. The bullet train resolves that contradiction at 300km an hour – the fastest train in the world, built by the slowest culture in it. The fastest slow train there is.

Then there is Switzerland’s Glacier Express, which does the opposite, declaring itself the slowest fast train in the world – eight sluggish hours to cross a couple of hundred Alpine kilometres, the slowness being the entire selling point. Then the Orient Express, which should not be confused with the Glacier Express; sharing its luxury with Switzerland and which tells you everything about old Europe. Its passengers prefer the idea of travel to the actual arrival, and it is built for those who would pay extortionately to jostle through the night, dressed elegantly for a place they have no intention of........

© The Irish Times