China, Italy, China, Germany

That’s the line up for the next few weeks. July and August have been quiet, with little work for TimOnTheTrain. That’s actually quite normal. My clients tend to be a tiny bit older, and they don’t do heat and they don’t do kids – both of which are everywhere during the Summer months.

This Thursday I’m off to China again (expect to see more of these since I have just renewed my Chinese Visa) on the Grand Tour of China. As always over there, the internet restrictions make life complicated, so blogging may be intermittent. The Blog posts re-post themselves automatically to Facebook & Twitter, but they do that server-side over here in the UK. So long as my Blog hasn’t been designated as inappropriate by China, I’ll be able to post, however, there has been a previous instance where TimOnTheTrain was blocked, so who knows!

When I get back, I have about 10 days off before launching my self into the ‘Italian Adventure‘ Tour for Great Rail Journeys. This promises to be a fun, if rather high speed Tour, taking the train to Torino and then onwards before flying back from Napoli.

This will mean that I have another chance to travel on the ‘Flying Tomato’ (The Frecciarossa), arguably the nicest trains in Europe.

After Italy, I have another 10 day break before it’s back to China for the final Tour of the 2019 season. It’s nice working on the same Tour several times – you get to know the Guides, the Hotel Staff and how things work, meaning that you have to worry less about the logistics and can pay more attention to the clients.

And finally for 2019 I’m off to Germany for the Railway Touring Company on the 30th November for 9 days doing Steam and Christmas Markets in the Harz Mountains and Saxony.

After all of that, TimOnTheTrain will steam into the maintenance shed for some well-earned R&R and to have his boilers de-coked and enjoy a thorough re-greasing and overhaul during the Winter.

Mrs TimOnTheTrain is looking forward to returning me to tip-top condition over Christmas.