Profile | Thailand train blogger Richard Barrow on his long and exciting journey: ‘It has just exploded’
- Visiting Thailand for the first time in 1993, British teacher and blogger Richard Barrow quickly fell in love with the country and its culture
- After years writing about Thai tourism and reporting on various disasters, he tapped into people’s love of trains – an endeavour that has only kept growing
I was born in Kent, southeast England, in 1967. My father, Dudley, was a dairy farmer. We’ve traced the family history back hundreds of years and every generation before me were farmers.
Our home was literally in the middle of nowhere. You could call it a hamlet, but it didn’t have a name as it was just five or six houses down an 800-metre (2,600-foot) stretch of road. Most of my neighbours were relatives.
I wouldn’t say it was difficult growing up. It was just a different kind of childhood. I was driving a tractor by the age of 12.
I went to school in the nearest village, Chiddingstone, which was also very small. It’s protected by the National Trust and is often used as a backdrop for movies because everything there looks as it did in the Victorian era.
Film buff
My ambition from a young age was to be a photojournalist as I was keen on telling stories using pictures. My mum, Jean, had her own dark room and taught me how to develop film.
This interest evolved into filmmaking. I became a real film buff. I loved the classics, especially Hitchcock’s work.
A lot of directors started life as runners on film sets so, after school, I applied for jobs in Soho (London). I got a job as a runner in a post-production company, which mainly did commercials.
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I was still living with my parents so all my money went on the commute. If there was a rail strike, I’d walk across central London. But it was a foot in the door.
Climbing the ladder
Eventually, I was made assistant film editor, which I did until I saw a job advertised at the BBC. To work in Ealing Studios, one of the historic film studios in London, was a big thing for me.
I took the job and ended up working on TV dramas as a sound editor. It was a really good, well-paid job. I also started writing for some free magazines distributed on the London Tube as I thought I might want to become a movie critic one day.
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I thought about getting on the property ladder in London but there was a hankering inside me to see the world. I’d never been abroad, except to France on school trips. So, in 1991, I decided to take a year off.
Catching the travel bug
I had relatives in Australia so I visited them, in Melbourne. I bought a station wagon and went all around the country. I had a lovely time, it was complete freedom.
The experience changed me and when I went back to the UK I found it difficult to settle down again. The only thing that kept me going was saving up enough money for another trip, which I set out on in August 1993.
This time I travelled to Moscow, where I boarded the Trans-Siberian Express to Beijing. I spent a couple of months in China.
Foreigners still had to use foreign-exchange certificate and stay at certain hotels, and there was a special line for buying train tickets. But I made some really good friends as Chinese students would come over and chat to practise their English.
I loved the trains, especially the free hot water that you got in carriages.
From China, I travelled to Pakistan and India and then flew to Bangkok. I only planned to stay a week in Thailand as the country had a bad reputation for sex and drugs.
Thailand charm
My mother ran Scout commissioner courses and she met Sirisook Rongraung and her sister, Seesagoon Krishanachinda, from a family-run private school in Samut Prakan province, when they went to London to attend her course. They kept in touch, so I contacted them when I arrived in Thailand.
They picked me up at the airport and took me to their school. They really made me feel welcome. They gave me my own room and I visited the classrooms.
I ended up teaching some classes and stayed for three months. I didn’t realise it at the time but I’d fallen in love with the country and the culture. When I continued on my trip down through Malaysia, Indonesia and on to Australia, I was thinking about the experience.
Even at that stage I was self-studying the Thai language. So when the owner of the school rang and asked if I would come back and teach for one year, I accepted. Almost 30 years later, I’m still at the same school.
Survival Thai
Samut Prakan City is not very big and there were no language schools when I arrived, so I started picking the brains of the Thai teachers. I even sat in on classes for kids, sitting with the students, learning Thai.
I felt that any words I was teaching the kids in English, I should know in Thai, so I always made a point of learning the vocabulary before I taught a class. After a while, it all started to make sense. In written Thai there are no spaces between the words, but I found, after two or three months, that I started seeing the spaces.
I suppose I was lucky that I wasn’t living in an expat hub like Sukhumvit in Bangkok. I know foreigners who have lived there for 10 or 20 years who still can’t speak a word of Thai. But my circumstances were very different. Basically, I had to learn Thai to survive.
Citizen journalist
I was a blogger before the word existed. Starting in Australia, I would write diary-length letters that I would sent back home. I bought my first dotcom (domain) name in 1997 and just started writing about tourism in Thailand.
I opened social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter later on, so I could communicate with my followers in real time. But it wasn’t until 2010 that I began to get a big following.
The Red Shirt protesters marched into Bangkok but the mainstream English-language media wasn’t reporting on certain practical details, like which roads were closed or where an explosion had taken place. So, translating from Thai sources, I started to tweet about this.
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People followed me because no one else was doing it. My reports had over a million views and I was even mentioned on CNN. Later on, when I met ambassadors or hotel managers, they said they were having meetings where they were going through my tweets.
I’ve kept up my reportage through various disasters that have afflicted Thailand since, from floods to the coup, which I post on my website, Thai News Reports.
Railway man
After so many years travelling the country by road and air, I was looking for a new angle to report on travel in Thailand. I was aware of a growing interest in slower, eco-friendly travel, so I came up with the idea of travelling the length and breadth of Thailand by rail, following all the trunk and branch lines.
I started Thai Train Guide as a small project in 2019 and it has just exploded. There’s so much interest from people passionate about rail travel, so much so that I’m now blogging about rail travel in neighbouring countries, too.
It’s been a lot of work, as the network is undergoing a great deal of change currently. They are double-tracking large sections of the railway, the main transport hub in Bangkok has moved from Hua Lamphong to Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal, and, of course, the high-speed line that will connect with Laos and China is under construction.
Digital Bradshaw
One of the loveliest train journeys in Thailand is along the Northern Line to Chiang Mai.
Most people miss the best part as the night train leaves around six in the evening and gets you there for breakfast. But Train 51 leaves Bangkok at 10.30pm, which means that sunrise is spent winding into the forest-covered mountains of the north. It’s spectacular.
It was on this track that I noticed the phone signal was poor, so I came up with the idea of a Thai rail guidebook, a PDF file you could download onto your device so you’d know what to look out for even if you didn’t have any connectivity.
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My inspiration came from the old Bradshaw’s Guide, which was popular in 19th century Europe. Bradshaw didn’t just publish timetables, he also told you all there is to see and do at each destination. Of course, I can add photos and maps as well.
As I began the project, I realised a whole book would be too long, so I decided to release it in sections as thematic chapters you can download from my website, with titles like the Maeklong Market Railway and the famous Death Railway, built by prisoners of war in World War II.
Bridging the past
As a movie buff, one of the few things I knew about Thailand before touching down in 1994 was The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). Of course, the film is basically a work of fiction. It wasn’t even filmed in Kanchanaburi province, but Sri Lanka.
However, there is a real Thai-Burma Death Railway. As a railway blogger, it’s of particular interest. I went there a few weeks ago to explore the whole length of the track, including Hellfire Pass. Nearby, I found a temple from where you can see a stretch of the track that still has the original sleepers.
Some of the railway is in deep jungle and quite dangerous to explore. The terrain reminded me of what those POWs were up against when they laboured on the track.
On Anzac Day they hold a special dawn service at the Hellfire Pass Museum at 5.30am. A lot of people start arriving at three or four o’clock in the morning. It’s dead silent and at some point you start hearing the birds chirping. It’s a very moving experience.
