What is it about train journeys through cities? Or train journeys to a city? There’s something so poignant in it. Part pride and part discovery and part choking-nostalgia. I’ve never forgotten the muddled way I felt as that S-Bahn train picked it’s grey way to Berlin. Or the familiar rise every time I saw the Hat Museum in Stockport and knew that Manchester could only be minutes away. And those sudden brick walls that enclose the train and seem to touch the sky and mean you’re in Liverpool now. Sometimes I don’t think you can be fully indebted to a city until you have looked upon it through the windows of a train.
And so, to London. The ways you can train to it and through it are so many and so varied that I could never tire of it. Here’s how I saw it (once).