Hello, I'm Lale Aric Hoglu and welcome to women who travel, a podcast for anyone who is curious about the world and excited to explore places both near and far from home. Today, we're journeying on trains, something that's important to me.

I think train travel is acutely underappreciated in the US.

But maybe that's partly because it's a country whose infrastructure isn't built around rail travel.

But as someone who grew up in the UK, I was lucky enough to have many family vacations in Europe.

And the way that I got to see that continent was by train.

Also, my mother had an intense fear of flying, which I think was why we relied on trains quite so much as we did.

She's getting over it now that she has to visit me in New York.

So, while school friends were going off to Disney World and all these places I was very

envious of as a child, my mother was insisting that we train hopped with backpacks around

Spain and Italy and France and Turkey.

One of my earliest memories of train travel was when I was about six or seven.

I took an overnight train with my parents

from Istanbul to Ankara. It was winter, and I think when people think of Turkey, they think of it as a

hot country, but it also does get cold, and it snows. It felt like that kind of train travel of

another era, as I think any sleeper train tends to do.

Rorettled through Turkey at night and arrived in Uncra early in the morning as the sun was rising,

the city blanketed in snow. I'll never forget the platform of the station being covered in a

sheet of ice and watching all of the porters slipping and skidding as they were pulling people's luggage along.

It was magical because of its quietness, its peacefulness, even though, well, train stations these

days and travel in general are kind of the antithesis of that.

The truth in the buckled to be 1518, sit up front of the dark. The door for you. The bus for a motor and you can't. It's just a minute.

The air-upon-the-air-upon-the-churched

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