The Man in Seat 61

Seat 61 seemed like the appropriate place to sit while en route to meet the Man in Seat 61, aka Mark Smith, aka the world’s most influential train travel guru. His website, seat61.com, takes the question “How do I best get from A to B without taking a flight?” and answers it to a breathtakingly accurate degree. There are logical routes between far-flung cities, forensically observed luggage rack assessments and detailed guidance on booking systems. The site’s sheer usefulness has led to him becoming, on some level, the de facto spokesperson for train travel: as a concept, as an aspiration, as something the authorities should be better at providing. Mark is famous in the way that Skyscanner, Citymapper and the personal finance guy Martin Lewis are famous: useful-famous.

When we spoke a few weeks ago, he described how he’d worked out how to build the website’s first manifestation 24 years ago thanks to a £2.95 magazine about coding in HTML. “I got a webpage online and I thought, ‘What shall I do?’ I decided to do something to fill the massive canyon between how easy it is to take the train to Italy, Spain, Budapest, Prague, wherever, and how impossible it had become to find anyone who’d tell you how to do it. I thought I’d be subversive and put this information online.” That was in 2001. He worked on it during his commute between Buckinghamshire and London, where he worked in the rail industry. The site started as a single page listing a dozen major European cities, with instructions as to how to get to each.

There is still something quite early-2000s about the experience of browsing Mark’s site. But in the middle of the 2020s, where complexity is in the service of anything other than the user, that feels more refreshing than anachronistic:
 

– text in Lucida Console typeface

– drop-down menus

– thumbnail images

– bullet points.

The plan is that I will arrive in London St Pancras at 14.30, and at 19.30 I will present myself at Euston station, from whence we will take the night train to Fort William in the Scottish West Highlands. Mark calls this the best train in Britain, and he has a detailed page about it on his website. After that we will take the famed West Highland Line to the port of Mallaig, a route so beautiful it was voted the best rail journey in the world by readers of ‘Wanderlust’ magazine and is on the itinerary for one of Belmond’s luxury train tours. Then we’ll come back again.

I’ve been worrying about whether the trip will work out at all. Last night was Britain’s coldest of the winter so far. A temperature of -13.3°C was recorded at Loch Glascarnoch, about 100 miles north from where we’re going. “New weather warnings as snow and ice cause travel havoc,” said a news alert on my phone just before I set off. Airports are closing their runways. The Met Office has asked rail passengers to check their journeys. But when I emerge out of the Channel Tunnel it is into a blue-skied country, at least. The train offers one final truly picturesque moment as it crosses the River Medway, and then we hit the various tunnels that herald our final approach. Tracey Emin’s giant neon handwriting looms over us at the arrivals platform at St Pancras, spelling out those well-chosen words (for a train station): “I want my time with you.”

When Mark, 59, shows up, he is wearing a blue shirt covered in crisscrossing lines. He’s been eating at a restaurant called Great Nepalese, which is exactly what his website recommends doing if you are taking this trip and want to have dinner first. By coincidence, Mark says, he ran into a pair of rail-focused YouTubers on his way into the lounge. I say that I felt nervous this morning reading all the weather warnings. But he checked the Caledonian Sleeper blog and there was nothing mentioned, so he wasn’t that worried. “The West Highlands is used to dealing with extreme weather,” he says.

An announcement informs us that the train is ready. The last time Mark took this trip was a year and a half ago, so he doesn’t have to do a big update and in theory can just enjoy the ride. But he is never completely off duty. Having boarded, I realise he is no longer behind me but outside, photographing the carriage.

The journey will take roughly 13 hours, during which time Mark, Tom (the photographer, who joined us on the platform) and I will each emit around 15 per cent of the carbon we’d have emitted if flying. It’s a growing motivation for seeking Mark’s guidance. “The reasons people give for wanting to do long train journeys have changed in the past ten years,” he says. “It used to be they had a phobia of flying or were medically restricted from doing so. What they say now is two things: they’re fed up with the experience of flying and they want to cut their carbon footprint.” His sense is that the former is still the stronger incentive, meaning that “if you want to get people to cut their carbon footprint, you’ve got to emphasise the experience,” he says. “It’s awful, but you’ve got to do it to save the planet.”

My friend Mark Holub, who is the leader of the Mercury-nominated jazz band Led Bib, uses the Man in Seat 61 fairly often. He lives in Vienna and, besides the environmental concerns, finds train travel is often easier with respect to the large, strangely shaped equipment a musician will often have in tow. He especially values the in-carriage photography. “The site is really useful if you want to know the inside of the train,” he told me. “As a musician, you’re thinking, ‘Where should I sit if I’m travelling with the double bass?’”

The cabins on the Deerstalker are small. They have to be. A train is not very wide, and an incredibly narrow corridor also needs to fit in somehow. In cabin F4 there are a bunk, a sink, a few hooks and hangers, power outlets and light switches. I am in a “club room,” so I have an en-suite toilet and shower, which are useful but also very space-efficient. A free sleep kit comprises an eye mask and earplugs.

I clamber down the corridor of the moving train so I can talk to Mark in the club car. To go with his haggis, neeps and tatties, he orders a little bottle of Bordeaux. He remembers taking a school trip to Saint Petersburg, then still called Leningrad, and seeing the famous Red Arrow sleeper train leaving for Moscow “to chords of triumphant music, lit up in the middle of glorious isolation in Leningrad Moskovsky station.” He was 17 years old. “As the music reached a crescendo, the brakes hissed off and things started to move. And as the last chords resounded through the station, the little red tail light disappeared off towards Moscow. I think it was the most moving train departure I’ve ever seen.”

As a child, he’d scour booklets of European timetables, letting the specificity of the information bring him closer to the places listed. “You looked up Turkey and it had a timetable with little bed symbols and the crossed knife and fork,” he says. “Mondays and Thursdays… Istanbul to Aleppo… You’d think: ‘Does this exist? Could I go?’”

That fascination was channelled into an early job at the rail specialist Transalpino, fielding queries from travel agents about the vagaries of European train service. The position helped pay his way through a philosophy, politics and economics degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was one of a minority of state school graduates. Instead of becoming a politician upon graduating, like many PPE alumni (the course has produced five British prime ministers), Mark donned a grey British Rail suit and one of those circular, peaked hats not unlike a French military kepi and trained to work as a station manager. His first posting, to a group of small stations in Kent, was a somewhat gentle initiation involving a lot of tea with signalmen and ticket clerks, but in 1991 he was promoted to a more challenging brief: running Charing Cross, the frenetic major terminus next to Trafalgar Square. “In Kent it was relatively easy,” he says. “Up in town you have all the problems: the sheer volume of passengers, the high level of sickness, the Friday night fights breaking out. For the first six months, you don’t know what’s hit you. Imposter syndrome cuts in. You know what you need to say, but you feel like an actor playing a part, speaking your lines.”

You still see hints of the policy advisor about Mark sometimes. In a good way, I mean. It’s partly in the way he speaks, deploying terms like “rolling stock,” “yield management” and “moquette” with the familiarity with which you and I use “movie” or “coffee.” It’s a big part of his power: gravitas, based on deep and tangible knowledge. You would never call him an influencer.

Mark’s site makes money through affiliate links, meaning that every time one of his 800,000 or so monthly visitors buys a ticket by clicking a link he receives a small percentage of the price they pay. It’s an elegant, invisible solution. When he started using the system and saw how much money it made him pretty much overnight, he realised the website was no longer a side project. “By 2007 I was earning more money on the train to work than I did when I got there,” he says. Like Clark Kent leaving the ‘Daily Planet’, he quit to fully commit to being the Man in Seat 61.

Through the night, the train rocks and sways. As I drift in and out of consciousness, there’s a sense of distance being not only covered but earned. Sometimes the train pauses for some kind of mid-journey maintenance task. I peek through the blind and am met by a garishly lit station. Being awake feels illicit, as if I’m a unit of inanimate cargo that has suddenly developed eyes. But there’s something cosy about it as well, like when you’re a child and your parents have come upstairs to get ready for bed and are whispering so as not to wake you.

Mark’s children are 16 and 18. Their existence is train-related too, in a way. In 2003, after six months together, he and his girlfriend, Nicolette, took a trip on the Orient Express. “It worked its very special magic, and somewhere in a snow-swept Brenner Pass we got engaged,” he tells me. They live in Quainton, Buckinghamshire, and have four cats and a dog.

We spend our two-hour layover in the station cafe, a classic place with a baked potatoes section on the menu and a sign on the wall saying “Good morning… Let the stress begin” (the women behind the counter seem anything but stressed). It’s quiet when we arrive, then gets increasingly crowded as noon approaches. Mark is wearing a Tom Tailor coat, blue jeans and Scarpa walking shoes. He has a silver wedding ring and a Seiko watch.

The YouTubers are with us too. They’re waiting for the bus to Inverness, from where they will catch the Kyle Line to Kyle of Lochalsh, right next to the Isle of Skye, documenting it for their channels as they go.

Paul’s channel, Wingin’ It!, has almost 400,000 subscribers, while Matt’s Nonstop Eurotrip has 135,000. A recent 20-minute video on Wingin’ It! documents a journey on Mexico’s Chepe Express, the epic service through Chihuahua with sweeping views of Copper Canyon.

It’s interesting to hear the three of them talk shop. Matt expresses wonder at the high-speed Beijing-to-Shanghai line. The train is one of the fastest in the world, taking just over four hours to travel 819 miles, which is roughly the same distance I have travelled since leaving Paris yesterday. Paul tells a story about one of the viaducts that carry the line we’re about to take to Mallaig. “They were constructed in around 1899,” he says. “There was an urban legend that a horse had fallen into one of the pillars. Eventually, in 2001, some academics got hold of a giant X-ray to check. They really did find a horse’s skeleton inside it.” Paul’s and Matt’s respect for Mark, for his status as a pioneer in the field and the comprehensiveness of his work, is palpable. “If you search for anything about trains, he’s in the top five results,” Paul says.

The train to Mallaig has open seating. Once we are on board, Mark considers a table, then decides against it and guides us to one a bit further down. He knows to sit on the left-hand side of the train, where the window will look out onto the silver water of Loch Eil, strips of fir trees, and frozen football pitches. “It’s not railways that I’m interested in per se,” he says. “That’s another thing. There are a lot of enthusiasts who are interested in the hardware for its own sake. I’m interested in travel: travel where you get to sit, eat in a restaurant, sleep in a bed, stand up and walk around and see where you’re going. You’re part of the landscape on a train. The aim is to instil that enthusiasm in other people.”

Music starts playing over the train’s PA. “I’ve never heard them do this before,” says Mark. Shazam tells me it’s by Capercaillie, a Scottish folk group, active since 1984. It stops after about a minute. Nobody explains.

It’s snowing again. Mark has taken this train roughly every two years since the 1980s. “It’s the most scenic route in Britain,” he says. “Some of it looks more remote than Siberia.” (Mark has travelled on the Trans-Siberian Express, before doing so became impossible.) Later this week, four lynx will be sighted about 50 miles east from here, origins unknown. We cross the Glenfinnan Viaduct, also known as the “Harry Potter Bridge” thanks to its appearance in four of the Harry Potter films as a key stretch of the Hogwarts Express line. We pass through Arisaig, the westernmost station in the UK. We cross the Morar, the country’s shortest river. As we arrive in Mallaig the snow evolves into driving hail. We take shelter in a pub.

Skyscanner, the platform for booking flights, which was created here in Scotland, was lately sold to a Chinese firm for £1.4 billion. Given the amount of money available for disruptive tech for simplifying travel, it seems incredible that Mark’s solo project should remain such a vital resource. Mark thinks it’s because the rail industry is so fragmented and complex. “I could sell you an airline ticket anywhere in the world – a flight in Mongolia, say – and you’d know what the plane was like. A metal tube full of seats,” he says. “Whereas all trains are different.”

Last year Mark travelled 5,000 miles in nine days across Spain and Portugal. He rode every major train type and photographed everything a passenger could conceivably find useful. “For my overseas visitors, particularly the Americans, you have to take a step back and explain things,” he says. “You don’t check your luggage in. You put it on the luggage racks.”

Tom, the photographer, shows us Paul Strand’s images from the 1950s of the people of South Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides – that byword for remote, rugged island life. The boat journey there from Mallaig would take three hours and 30 minutes, but we’ve reached the end of our circuit and it’s time to go back.

By breakfast we are back in the London sprawl. What train developments should we be excited about in the future? Mark thinks the Rail Baltica fast line, due to link the capital cites of the various Baltic states in five years’ time, will be a game changer. “Thai high-speed rail is on the way,” he says. “Malaysia is completing electrification.” He doesn’t mention America. “I’m hoping Portugal and Spain will get their act together,” he laments. “To go between Madrid and Lisbon currently takes eleven hours and involves three trains, requiring two tickets bought on two websites.” When the line from Paris to Milan, closed since 2023 due to a landslide, reopens in spring, Mark will be on the first train. “It’s important to get on the inaugural service. It enables me to stay ahead of the game.” We say goodbye at the station as Tom gets a last few shots.

At 14.31 I’m on the Eurostar back to Paris. Standard class, and this time not in seat 61, but directly across from it. A woman is there, watching prestige TV on her phone. I decide against leaning over and asking if she knows the significance of the seat number. I open my browser instead and go to the page on Mark’s website where you can choose cities of departure and arrival. It’s fun to select them at random – Stockholm to Marseille? Geneva to Athens? – and imagine following each carefully calibrated route. Geneva to Milan… Milan to Bari… Ferry to Patras… Patras to Athens… Does this exist? Could I go?