What immediately came to mind was a similar drama surrounding the train trip of the body of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from lying in state in the Ottawa parliament building to the state funeral in his home-town, Montreal.
As someone who does regularly travel across Europe I just cannot see myself not using the 12 hour (including all connections, hanging around at the airport etc) route from Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic to Faro in Portugal in favour of the 48-56 hour train trip between the same places.
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The 220-mile train trip from New York to Boston, for instance, emits the same amount of CO2 as is stored in 2.5 cubic feet of mangrove forests.
But often it is the encounters on the train that are the highlights of a trip.
The movie Roger Ebert calls "a first-rate thriller" tells the tale of a fateful train trip, with strangers offering to "exchange" murders, each killing the person the other wants dead.
But last summer, fed up with the 25-hour train trip to see his family, Mr. Zhang moved to Chongqing and joined Quanta.
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The long, monotonous train trip gave him ample time for reflection.
Before the end-of-Ramadan holiday, the Indonesian government cut train fares for those making the annual trip to their home village.
Calculate carbon offsets for your car, plane or train trip with the free United Nations Environment Programme Carbon Calculator iPhone app.
Then she radioed to a dispatcher, who called another worker on the platform at World Trade Center, to alert her that a new train was about to make the trip under the river.
Barron hopes that the 600-passenger X Train will make its first trip by NYE 2013, but there are still logistical hurdles to overcome in the in the next year.
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There are the recreational runners who train for years to make the qualifying time, then spend another year preparing for the hilly trip from Hopkinton to Boston's Back Bay.
We were desperate for some spring, as we are in the Northeast right now, and a day trip to Lisse (about 30 minutes from Centraal Station by train) seemed like the perfect curative.
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Similarly, what caused a minor hiatus about George Osborne's train trip back from his constituency was not the fact that he hadn't bought a first class ticket.
With the airspace having been closed, a marathon trek started with a train journey from Nottingham to London, followed by a faster, sleeker train from London to Brussels and then the longest road trip of my life to the destination for Saturday's WBC super-middleweight title defence against Mikkel Kessler.
Our train averaged 185 miles per hour during the 923-mile trip from Shanghai to Beijing.
Driving your car to a park-and-ride station and taking the train downtown is now cheaper and perhaps faster than the average trip on the congested highway.
But that would have meant an arduous trip by sea, train and probably air east to the United Arab Emirates - in the wrong direction - before flying back across Europe and the Atlantic to Barbados.
And 300 dogs will sniff every train car before it starts its trip and again before it enters the city in a hunt for hidden explosives.
Even on the train home from London where I was on 3G for the majority of the trip (but with 4G as I left London and arrived home in Edinburgh) EE was consistent and maintained coverage.
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Literature fans may want to take a brief side trip to Tegna where the author Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley) spent the last years of her life (her grave is in the Tegna cemetery).
And like every other commuter, she had grown accustomed to the trip: the passages of countryside, the villages, the teeming train stations.
During the trip to Baker Street, the royal party met ticket, maintenance and train staff, including people involved in the restoration of rolling stock.
If a train trip takes more than three or four hours, five at most, rail travel will always be the loser.
Train travel is a beautiful way to see the landscape and, at about 65km, it is a relatively quick trip between both points.
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