What's the site? The Man in Seat Sixty-One
What does it do? Gives you any information you could possibly desire about travelling by rail, almost anywhere in the world. I particularly appreciate the emailable booking forms for Russian train travel.
Why we love it: I can't exactly remember when I first came across the Man in Seat Sixty-One. (That's a reference to his favourite seat on the Eurostar, which makes him my kind of rail traveller.) I think it might well have been in the Guardian, back in 2005. Regardless, the article or blog post or whatever was a bit of a "look at this Internet geek!" and a bit of "...actually, this is really useful".
Since I'm a travel geek myself, I come down strongly on the latter. (And not just because I have some photos on the Latvia page.) I used the site extensively to plan my northwest Russia rail trip, and have been enabling my wanderlust with the possibilities of the Silk Route and the Trans-Siberian railway.
There's also an excellent page on the Eurostar, and I last used it when my friend Kristen was visiting in September 2008 and got caught up in the delays in the lorry fire in the Channel tunnel to find out just how long the train-ferry-train from London to Paris now takes. (Answer: ten hours.)
If you like this, you'll also like:
- bahn.de: German Deutsche Bahn
- Online map of the European rail network (PDF)
- Other rail trips here on Voyagers
