Countries pass the carriage window

Paul Theroux boards a commuter train in Boston and keeps going by rail through Mexico and Central America to Patagonia, recording the people and places with a sharp, often difficult voice.

Three decades after The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux retraces his route across Europe and Asia by train, measuring how the places, and he himself, have changed.

Eric Newby travels the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late 1970s with his wife and official Soviet companions, finding comedy in the bureaucracy and the long days aboard.

David Greene, NPR’s former Moscow correspondent, rides six thousand miles of the Trans-Siberian in 2013 and stops along the way to ask ordinary Russians about their lives and their country.

Peter Millar rides Cuba’s aging railway from Havana to the far end of the island near Guantánamo Bay, sharing carriages and opinions with ordinary Cubans in the late Castro years.