Great Railway Journeys

Editor of Private Eye and TV satirist Ian Hislop discovers India by travelling by rail from the port of Calcutta to the desert forts of Rajasthan. On the way he poses for photographs outside the Taj Mahal, visits the Indian parliament and is pampered aboard a special train called the Palace on Wheels.

Ex-cabinet minister Michael Portillo reveals his complicated family roots as he makes good use of Spain's extensive rail network to visit the hordes of relatives who remember his father, a poet and professor of law who joined the republican forces during the Spanish Civil War.

The BBC's Asia correspondent Fergal Keane explores Japan, contrasting life in the busy, sprawling cities with the peace in the countryside as he learns about the nation's spiritual side.

Chef Rick Stein crosses Mexico from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, travelling on the spectacular rail route that winds through Copper Canyon and the Sierre Madre mountains.

Comedian Nick Hancock crosses Cuba, where his plans are disrupted by the country's crumbling infrastructure and the arrival of Hurricane Georges.

Hollywood star Danny Glover travels through Senegal into poverty-stricken Mali on a journey to discover whether such nations can achieve economic advancement without a loss of African identity. Along the way, he meets musician Youssou N'Dour and film director Sembene Ousmane.

The first traveller in this seven-part series of adventures is comedian Victoria Wood who makes a round trip to the north of Britain by train from Crewe, taking in both the east and west coasts and fuelled by endless cups of tea. 

In the second of the new series of adventures, comedian Alexei Sayle travels along what is left of the Hejaz line in Syria. Arriving in Jordan, he catches an excursion train out of Amman and heads into the desert to discover the truth about Lawrence of Arabia.

Celebrated African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr explores his roots in a 2,000-mile trip to the Tanzanian bush village where he did voluntary work as an idealistic teenager. His wife and daughters accompany him, but they miss the trappings of their life back home.

In search of a new plot idea, Hollywood screenwriter and actor Buck Henry goes to Argentina. Using the country's rail network he travels to Patagonia, discovering the ranch of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Travelling along a British-built railway line connecting Kenya to Uganda, explorer Benedict Allen searches for the source of the White Nile.

Booker Prize-winning novelist Ben Okri leaves hectic London to find peace and tranquillity in Arcadia, the remote corner of Greece that has inspired writers and painters since the time of Virgil.

Mountaineer and photographer Chris Bonington takes his camera, lap-top computer and climbing boots to Canada for a cross-country rail trip through some of the world's most spectacular scenery. 

Barrister-turned-TV host Clive Anderson is the first of six celebrities to indulge a passion for train travel in a new series of rail explorations. From Hong Kong, Anderson sets out on his 2,500-mile epic with influenza, an eye infection and a Chinese phrase book. But as he gradually becomes accustomed to the train's cuisine - chicken's feet a speciality - he discovers a country in the throes of social and political change. The journey ends on the Trans-Siberian Express at Ulan Bator in Mongolia. 

Journalist, author and anti-apartheid campaigner Rian Malan , in the second of this new six-part series, wrestles with his country's troubled past and increasingly uncertain future as he takes a journey spanning South Africa. With its own police force and welfare service, South African Railways once represented the nerve centre of the apartheid state, but as a result of the political upheaval, the network is now crumbling. On his trip, Malan visits the torched remains of Mahatma Gandhi 's commune on the outskirts of Durban, and Johannesburg, a city with the highest murder rate in the world. His journey is completed in the Lost City, a luxurious fantasy world in Bophuthatswana, where life remains sweet for the white man with money. 

"I feel as if I have been on this train for ever," says Natalia Makarova , the former Kirov prima ballerina, as the Bolshoi Express begins to cross the steppes of Asia. "My mind is filled with buried memories one moment, fresh with new discoveries the next. Makarova defected to the west in 1970 and now returns with her American-born teenage son to St Petersburg, the city of her birth and her greatest artistic triumphs. In the third programme of this six-part series in which famous people undertake memorable journeys, they board the luxury train on its two-week trip to the east. She is saddened by Russia's wasted past and present-day decadence, while her tragic family history haunts her at Volgograd's vast war memorial. But there are happier moments when she dances on the railway track, goes sturgeon fishing on the Volga and wanders among the blue domes and minarets of romantic Samarkand.

Michael Palin has travelled round the world In 80 days and then journeyed from North to South Pole - all in the cause of television journalism and entertainment. In contrast, a journey from Londonderry, in the north of Ireland, to Kerry in the south is a less frenetic trip. But it does fulfil Palin's love of travel.... and trains in particular."There is something about railways that makes life seem tantalisingly simple," he says. "it's a world In which choices are made for you, courses mapped out, paths already plotted, and the direction Is always forward."On his journey Palin separates the myth from the reality about Irish rail travel, learns more about his Irish great-grandmother, and discovers that railways - and Ireland's train-spotters - are strictly non-sectarian. From Belfast he catches the "peace train", a service operated jointly by Northern Ireland Railways and Irish Rail, and travels to Dublin. Then it's Cork, the village of Buttevant, and a search for his roots.

Train travel is something special to poet-novelist Lisa St Aubin de Teran, even when things don't go absolutely according to plan. "I love the feeling of being inside the kaleidoscope that rail travel gives, of breaking down all the barriers, of flirting with life without having to make a lasting commitment," she says. In the fifth of six programmes in which well known people undertake railway adventures, she begins her journey in the Brazilian coffee town of Santos and heads for the now infamous drug city of Santa Cruz in the foothills of the Bolivian Altiplano. In the sticky heat of the tropical rainy season, a difficult expedition is made worse by unreliable timetables, rail strikes, late running trains and, in some cases, no trains at all. She sees the poverty and drug-induced violence of Sao Paulo, passes through a swamp larger than Britain, feeds hungry looking crocodiles and is serenaded by Brazilian singer Paulo Simoes.

For Mark Tully , the BBC's much respected correspondent on the Indian sub-continent, a 1,000-mile trip on the romantic Khyber Mail from Karachi to the Khyber Pass fulfilled a life's ambition. Tully's travels bring to an end this series in which well known train lovers undertake memorable journeys. He discovers that in Pakistan, where railways are a legacy of the British Raj and remain the mainstay of the transport system, style is more important than speed. "In an Islamic country nothing is believed to happen without God's help," he says. "But Pakistani railwaymen know that even Allah cannot guarantee that their trains will run on time." Tully takes a detour on a steam-hauled goods train, chugs through the Bolan Pass to Quetta, most Islamic of all  Pakistan's cities, and catches the first train for 11 years to go through the Khyber Pass, closed since the Soviet-Afghan war. 

The Broadway Limited; The San Francisco Zephyr; The Coast Star-light; there are still famous trains to ride as you cross America. In the first of seven travel films, LUDOVIC KENNEDY retraces the journey of a fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, who took an emigrant train from New Jersey to California in 1869. The modern journey is from Pennsylvania Station in New York to Union Station in Los Angeles. Along the line, Kennedy meets characters as diverse as Douglas Fairbanks Jr , Hobo Joe from Sacramento and Rogers Whitaker - aged 83 and generally acknowledged to be the world's greatest railroad buff. 

From Sydney to Perth the line goes, two thin ribbons of steel, all the way across from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean on the other side. It crosses most of the history of Australia as well as its geography. Across the Blue Mountains, down into the waterless waste of the New South Wales bush, through the Flinders Ranges into the Nullarbor Plain, where for 500 miles it runs without a curve, the longest straight railway line in the world. In the second of seven travel films, playwright and journalist MICHAEL FRAYN traces the Australian dream of a transcontinental railroad, not only on the East-West Indian Pacific, but on the eccentric Ghan train chugging north to Alice Springs at a reckless 17 mph. 

Nothing in the imagination can quite prepare the first-time visitor for the pure shock of India. But, armed with a 130 rail pass and some hazy notion of a destination, BRIAN THOMPSON boards the '85 Down Madras Mail' with a few inward butterflies - but all South India to aim at. It is a five-day journey, through four states and as many languages. Across the mighty plains of the Deccan and Mysore, and high up into the Nilgiri Mountains, home of the Ooty Club and the legendary Nilgiri Express. 

As a boy, Michael Palin spent hours on Sheffield Midland Station train-spotting. It's a habit he never outgrew, and now he fulfils every enthusiast's dream - a journey from one end of Britain to the other, from Euston to Kyle of Lochalsh, along routes steeped in railway history.

Cape Town to the Victoria Falls - still the most romantic railway journey in Africa. MICHAEL WOOD, a young historian, follows the trail of the empire builder, Cecil Rhodes. His journey takes him through the great wilderness of the Karoo and the diamond fields of Kimberley to the gold city of Johannesburg and its sprawling offspring. Soweto. Leaving South Africa, Wood travels through Botswana around the edge of the Kalahari into a war, for, in December 1979, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was still a battlefield as the politicians argued out a cease-fire agreement in London.

The highest railroad in the world climbs the Peruvian Andes. After 60 tunnels, 45 bridges and switch-backs to 15,000 feet, MILES KINGTON gives up record-breaking and takes the only rail route southwards to Bolivia. From Cuzco, the Inca capital, Kington crosses some of the finest scenery in South America, riding variously on footplate, Pullman, vintage railcar and steamer - all built in Britain. Timetables and people he met suggested the route. So, well briefed on the local history of revolutions, Kington decided to try a smooth crossing of Lake Titicaca - the calm before the storm. He soon found the storm. 

First-class luxury on the Cisalpin from Paris to Montreux. Rack and pinion up and down Rigi Mountain. Steam at Zillerthal. Children running their own railway in Hungary. You can fly from London to Budapest in three hours. This journey involves 16 trains and as much time as you like.Europe's railway network is still alive and well, but for how much longer?