The train was never the slow option.

In February 2026 I took a ferry out of Portsmouth with a rucksack, a paper timetable and one rule: no aircraft, for any reason, for a year. Eight stops later I am somewhere in Transylvania, roughly 6,400 rail kilometres in, and the rule has turned out to be the least interesting thing about the trip.

What replaced it was arithmetic. When flying is off the table, every additional city costs six to eleven hours of daylight spent sitting still — so depth becomes cheaper than breadth, and the honest response is to stay put. Six nights minimum, more if the place earns it. Nine in Porto. Thirteen in Marseille. Twelve in Kotor, watching the same stretch of water go from turquoise to slate and back.

What is actually in these dispatches

One long piece per stop, written on the ground and posted before the next train. Every price is the price I paid, in the currency I paid it in, including the ones that were a mistake. Every timetable detail was true when I used it and should be checked before you rely on it. Nothing here is sponsored, hosted, gifted or comped, mostly because nobody has offered.

I get things wrong in public. The Calanques walk in Marseille was badly planned and says so. The Škocjan bus was missed once before it was caught. The Swiss leg broke the budget by roughly €600 and the arithmetic is in the piece.

Why there are no photographs

Because I am not a good enough photographer to add anything to the several million existing images of the Douro at sunset, and because a travel site made entirely of other people’s stock imagery is worse than one made of nothing.

Instead each stop gets a two-ink print — layered silhouettes generated from that stop’s motif and colourway, with a grain pulled over the whole plate. They are drawings of a shape of place rather than a record of it. The overlaps darken the way real risograph ink does, which is the only honest thing about them.

How it is built

Each dispatch is a markdown file with typed frontmatter, validated at build time, so a stop with a missing coordinate or a bad date fails the build rather than the page. The route diagram is generated from the same coordinates. The site is TanStack Start, statically rendered and deployed on Netlify; the letter sign-up is a Netlify form.

There is no analytics script, no cookie banner and no comment section. If you want to argue with something, the address is in the letters.