IN THE PINK The upmarket Palace Hotel Tokyo, situated just across the moat from the Imperial Palace gardens, is selling a two-night Blossoming Tokyo package, which anticipates the coming cherry blossom season with the promise of a private, chauffeur-driven tour to some of the best viewing sites in the capital, a seasonal lunch, a bottle of exclusive house sake and more.

DARK PASSAGES Hurtling headlong through the foreign darkness, beneath a frantic swirl of steam, no mode of transport stirs feelings of romance, mystery and adventure quite like the night train. Starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940), night trains have long been a successful milieu for filmmakers.

Numerous night-train novels, too, have been written, by the likes of Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon and Maurice Dekobra, who got the first fictional Orient Express under steam with the bestselling Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, which was published in 1925 (and adapted for the cinema in 1928 and 1955).

In his latest railway-related book, Night Trains, Andrew Martin attempts to recreate some of the great real-life nocturnal journeys once offered by Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens – services such as the Orient Express, the Blue Train and the Sud Express – using what few night trains remain in service on the European continent. He also takes a non-Wagons-Lits-related trip up the coast of Norway, and one of the last train-ferries, from Malmo, in Sweden, to Berlin, Germany.