Public transport trips tips

It took the second thud to rouse me. Worried I’d slept through it, I slid up the blind to find our train pulling into the port city of Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, Italy. Not quite 6am, the last of the night’s sky was taking leave: navy clouds pulled apart before my eyes, a single neon-pink patch igniting the ridgeline of the Peloritani mountains in north-east Sicily.

The No 50 Purbeck Breezer travels regularly between Swanage and Bournemouth past the beautiful beaches of Studland Bay. Behind Knoll Beach there’s a heathland nature reserve with a lagoon and a giant natural sand pit. In Poole we visited the Japanese garden at Compton Acres and the historic harbour. From a child’s perspective, the best thing about the No 50 is that it goes on a boat: the chain ferry that plies the harbour mouth between Studland and Sandbanks. The return trip at sunset on the open upper deck made us laugh out loud: it was like being on a rollercoaster. Jenny Lunnon

In the gloom caused by the loss of many rural bus services and Rishi Sunak’s shameful rollback of environmental pledges, there has been one gleam of (green) light. The bus fare cap, now set at £2.50 across England, will run until 30 November 2024. The cap doesn’t apply to buses in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but there are still some reasonable fares, so here are 10 great sightseeing routes across the UK.

The classic rail route from Prague to Vienna through southern Bohemia was relegated to secondary status in the 1970s, but today it still offers one of the most engaging railway journeys in central Europe. Never ones to rush, my partner and I decided earlier this month to travel the length of the Emperor Franz Joseph Railway by slow trains.

Pristine white peaks all around, and skis crunching over crisp snow. If any holiday feels like escapism, it’s a ski holiday. But climate breakdown is increasingly threatening to poop the party.

Does there come a point in every marriage when you realise you don’t know your spouse very well after all? For me, that moment came not when watching yet another ill-judged birthday present shoved to the back of my husband’s wardrobe, but when I noticed a half-price sale on Interrail passes and decided to book a pair for what I felt sure would be an excellent and perhaps even romantic late-summer adventure.

‘Leith is changing. Bars are becoming bistros, and barbers are opening with bars in them,” says walking guide Paul Stewart, founder of Edinburgh Street Tours. He points to the new tram station atop Leith Walk and says, “It feels more tram-spotting than Trainspotting,” a reference to the drug-addled 90s black comedy written by Leith-born Irvine Welsh. Stewart is not complaining as he used to survive on the streets of this old port where, in the 1980s, half the unemployed had been jobless for over a year. It was no accident that Leithers the Proclaimers used Leith as the video backdrop for their damning riposte to Thatcherite Scotland, Letter from America.