Mark Johnson

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When Eurostar got it wrong

I'm a huge fan of the cross-Channel rail service, Eurostar. So much so that, not only did I write most of my first novel Changing Trains on Eurostars, I also set the 'present day' part of the story onboard these trains. Now, most of this all took place on the 'old' Eurostar trains, and a couple of years ago the company started rolling out a whole new train set. Oh dear! This video review shows how the company somehow managed to strip out most of the old comfort and mystique and replaced it with rattly plastic, lots of glass, extremely bright lighting and poorly furnished interiors. The designers are the same folks who usually make interiors for things like Ferrari cars - expensive and uncomfortable at the best of times - and they've clearly never travelled on trains. I know it all sounds a bit moany, but as I said, I'm a huge fan and a very loyal customer of Eurostar, but sometimes your 'besties' just get it wrong. The company sa

How a 1930s novelist inspired Changing Trains

Christopher Isherwood British novelist Christopher Isherwood was a major influence on my first novel, Changing Trains . Even the title is a nod to his darkly humorous work 'Mr Norris Changes Trains', which, by the way, is a fun read if you want to delve into the pre 2nd World War lives of British expats living in Germany. Isherwood famously travelled by train from London to Berlin in the 1930s to soak up life in the Weimar Republic and of course taste the 'boys', as he famously wrote later on in his book 'Christopher and His Kind'. Of course, had he not gone there, the world would never have had 'Goodbye to Berlin' the fab stories of William Bradshaw and Sally Bowles that inspired one of the most popular ever musicals, Cabaret! I so wish he was still around today, as I would have loved to have talked with him about his writing and how he captured the hedonism of the Weimar Republic. Cabaret actor Michael York with Don Bachardy (right) I

Why I wrote Changing Trains

On a cold and wintry January afternoon in 2018 I finally plucked up the courage to publish my first novel. I didn't have an agent or a publisher. So, alone, I tackled the cumbersome task of preparing and loading Changing Trains to that huge, enormous, bookstore in the ether called Amazon. Changing Trains is a travel story within a travel story and my favourite thing about it is that it spans two timescapes - the present and the ever so funky, cool and uncool, high shoulder padded decade of excess known as the 1980s. Sam, the main character is on a Eurostar heading from London down to New Aquitaine for the weekend when a chance encounter causes him to reminisce about an event in 1985 that changed the course of his life. That event was a month's long Interrail trip across Europe. After a tense meeting with his grim reaper HR manager, Sam throws his job out the window and leaves his small-town home in Scotland to embark on a journey that will transform him from an

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