COMMENTwith ALAN MILLAR
For many transport fans, one of the more joyful features of recent television programming has been the proliferation of railway travelogue documentaries.
Michael Portillo seems to have been on our screens most weeks, taking his battered hundred-year-old Bradshaw’s directories on journeys across Britain, continental Europe, North America and most recently India. But there have been several others, including the actress Dame Julie Walters riding heritage steam lines and British coastal railways.
All of these succeed not just in appealing to an enthusiast audience, but to anyone who derives pleasure from travelling, visiting new places and people, learning of their history and admiring spectacular scenery or notable buildings.
The main idea is to open the public’s eyes to the existence of sights that can be enjoyed from a seat on a bus if they get to know that the route exists in the first place
For those of us who take similar enjoyment from longer bus journeys, they raise that interminable question of why there is nothing similar about the best bus rides we could experience, at home especially but maybe also abroad. Where, we ask ourselves, is the Portillo figure who could convey …
