Can travelling by train make sense if you have the option of going by air? The flight to Singapore takes about two hours. The train, with no stopovers except where you have to change trains in Butterworth, takes from 3pm on day 1 till breakfast time on day 3. When they hear of our plan our friends smile politely and wonder if we are just eccentric or much older than we look. 

But, I tell myself, you don’t have to be old to find a special attraction in travelling by train. The attraction is hard to pin down. A long train journey offers a kind of peace, a separation from routine, phones, fax machines and the daily hassle of commuting. Perhaps the attraction is from a feeling that moving between places separated by distance and culture should be a process, not simply of standing in line, having forms stamped and hearing piped muzak, but of experiencing gradual, subtle changes in landscape, cultural symbols and living standards. The journey somehow seems more real if you arrive with at least some idea of the places lying between your destination and where you started. If you need to be macho about it you can say you need 36 uninterrupted hours to prepare a business presentation.

There is a decadent attraction too in being waited on for a day and a half, all the more so if like us you are going first class. We get a taste of this before we leave Hua Lampong station. A girl comes in with a tray and four glasses of orange juice, declaring: “No sugar, no salt.” She has heard about foreigners' peculiar tastes. Aha I think, first class is OK. But she ruins everything by saying conspiratorially as she passes me on the way out: “Pay later”.

In the plastic world of travel agents and their glossy brochures train travellers are looked down upon and discriminated against, there is no doubt about it. I felt it when I bought the tickets, and I feel it as long as we trundle through the underside of the city where, somehow, the train tracks are always to be found. Riding in a train through almost any town, including Bangkok, gives me the feeling of sneaking a look impolitely from behind. You pass mares’ nests of electric wires erupting in all directions from concrete poles, the grimy undersides of bridges, the backs of apartment buildings where people hang laundry from the windows and throw their garbage.

But we have the advantage outside the city, heading into the countryside. Train travellers are patronised because they are considered poor and unlikely to make corporate purchases. So much the better, because nobody has yet thought of obscuring the view from the tracks with billboards or those residential estates with English sounding names like "Green Lake" spelled out in Thai for the under-educated nouveau riche. Instead of the tasteless commercialisation hemming in the motorists we look out on quiet villages, cows trudging dumb and patient through their flooded fields, farmers dwarfed at the controls of their two-wheel power tillers, ploughed fields framed by palms and fruit trees and with a wooden house over in one corner, temples touched by saffron and surrounded by whitewashed walls. In the train you are part of a simpler and less flashy world.

And there is a smoothness to train travel which is a welcome change from stopping at traffic lights, switching from lane to lane to avoid hurtling pick-up trucks and ten-wheelers. We sit in air-conditioned comfort sipping a glass of juice, slide through the countryside, ease into a station from time to time and slide gracefully out, enjoy having the right of way at the level crossings, get perverse pleasure from seeing the lines of cars waiting for us to pass. For once we can watch the traffic dispassionately without hearing it, smelling it or feeling threatened or delayed by it.

We head west from Bangkok and turn south, the landscape alternates between the grim commercialism of sugar cane fields, the demure sophistication of a few rai of straight-rowed mango trees where a courageous farmer has invested in his land, the homeliness of neatly kept rice fields just harvested and others newly planted where irrigation gives their owners an extra chance to make a few baht each year.

The towns delay us occasionally for a few not unwelcome minutes. In Nakhon Pathom we can see the top of the country’s highest chedi, golden in the sunset, above the roofs just beyond the station. We sit for a while in Ratchburi in the early evening watching the pavement vendors setting up their stalls along a quiet road, framed by a forest of TV aerials pulling in the latest and best of the Bangkok soaps. Some boys are warming themselves beside a fire in Phetburi. Another forest of TV antennae is clear enough but it is too dark to make out the frangipanis on the hill which dominates the town.

The tracks are some way from European standards and, thankfully, we roll on through the night at an unremarkable speed. Derailments are more common than the company might care to admit. Half asleep, I have the feeling that we stop often. Sometimes there is a station, sometimes not, sometimes we start lazily up again after an express has rattled by in the opposite direction.  By dawn we have almost reached the ugliness of Had Yai and there is a grey mist hanging over the fields between stands of rubber trees and in the hollows. We are in a different season. The rice is young, and wet from a recent shower. An old man leads reluctant buffaloes with a rope, frozen in mid-stride as we pass, a woman hoes her vegetable plot. For a while there is a flat landscape of yellowed rice fields and scattered skinny palms with loose balls of foliage fifty feet above the ground, like giant pins pushed at random into a giant pin cushion.

Border control at Padang Besar is a chance to get down on the platform for a few minutes of stretching, yawning and foot stamping, sipping inimitable railway coffee. The procedures are as efficient as you would expect for a place half way between chaotic Bangkok and regimented Singapore. The first contact with Malaysian bureaucracy is not promising. A bumptious little hustler demands 50 baht for helping with the immigration procedures when he has done no more than hand out forms which were freely available on the station. People at least stand in line, but there seems an even chance that I will end up with the wrong passport and, the traveller’s dream, the opportunity of escaping into a stranger’s life. But the wait on the platform is painless and my persona is drearily unchanged.

Across the northern Malaysian state of Perlis we pass some extraordinary wooded, sugar-loaf hills that rise abruptly from the fields. The landscape gradually begins to look more complete than we are used to, though this is Malaysia’s rice bowl and for the most part we see a familiar mix of rice, rubber and a variety of palms. Most of the rice is irrigated, set out in big rectangular carefully levelled fields, a single shade of dark green.  

We come eventually to the rail spur into Butterworth and as we cross a river we can see a bridge arching over towards Penang island out on the seaward side. We wait an hour or so between trains, enough time to arrange our tickets, eat a plate of fried rice and begin getting used to the Muslim atmosphere.

Getting tickets for Kuala Lumpur is held up by a boorish queue jumper and we need a little patient diplomacy. But diplomatic or not, the trains from KL to Singapore are booked nearly solid. For that leg of the journey I end up with a third class ticket when I had wanted to continue in stately, self-indulgent first class comfort.

The Malaysians are betting that oil palm has a brighter future than rubber, and the landscape after Butterworth shows a gradual transition from one to the other. Compared to Thailand more plantations are substantial estates rather than small-holdings, and there are big unbroken stands of trees which follow our route for a kilometer or so at a time. One estate has been burned and the trees are blackened with their grey fronds hanging straight down like gloomy veils on an army of giant, downcast widows.

The landscape transforms itself from cultivated trees to natural forest and two hours out of Butterworth we wind our way between hills and around the heads of valleys where, astonishingly for anyone who has come to accept the Thai countryside as normal, the woods are apparently intact, railway, roads and villages notwithstanding.  The curves are tight and occasionally a mountain stream runs under the tracks, we rumble through a few tunnels. Where there are settlements the houses are mostly of one storey with red tiled roofs. Only the poorer villages have Thai-style wooden, two storey houses.

We cruise into Ipoh, where you would get off to go to the Cameron Highlands. Again there is that sense of completeness in the townscape, as if the builders have taken their time to finish their work on roads and buildings instead of leaving a mess and rushing off to the next project. If the people’s appearance is a guide there is too a sense of conservatism, encompassing modesty but not repression. Many women are covered almost to their ankles, though in bright, attractive colours, and wear head scarves which expose moon-shape faces from their foreheads to under their chins and not quite to their ears.

After Ipoh there is a mess of white quarry workings dug into flat land, looking like Cornish china clay but without the mountains of waste. The desolation continues for several kilometers. But an hour from KL it is a landscape again of plantations: mature rubber, oil palms which look too overgrown to be harvested, sometimes a few acres of cassava. Most of the time the trees come nearly to the tracks and obscure everything more than a few meters away. Occasional breaks where there is a vegetable garden or a group of houses reveal wooded hills away to the east, black against the evening sky.

At sunset our otherwise urbane steward changes his clothes and sets out his prayer mat, glancing through the window occasionally to make sure of his timing. At the appointed moment he and his voluble friend transport themselves, eyes closed, into their ritual, chanting at a slight angle to the path of the train towards what they judge to be west. Most of the passengers are Malays, but only the steward and his friend are praying.

The KL railway station is in the middle of town, and we slide in past tall buildings and sleek overpasses where the traffic is moving smoothly. The station is an elegant white building topped with minarets and domes, three of them larger than the others and raised on slender legs above octagonal towers. It is impressive even now, 100 years after it was built and after a background has sprung up of much taller, modern and equally stylish buildings. Among these is the national mosque with its modernistic spire beside a sprawling, low assembly hall which from a distance resembles a massive pale blue tent.

We could continue south after an hour or so, but KL is new to us and we stay two nights. It is an impressive city and the wait is more than justified. In developing their capital the Malaysians have, so far, preserved more of their historical roots than the Singaporeans have. The Moorish architectural style predominates in substantial, old buildings like the much-photographed Sultan Abdul Samad palace with its onion-shaped copper domes. But the same graceful curves appear also in modern high rises.

Old China Town is all shop-houses, built 100 years ago and still solidly functional with the second storey built out over a footpath which is invaded from both sides with stalls offering everything from underwear and watches to dried squid. Somehow the fans in the shops keep the air moving and cool even in the early afternoon.

Compared to Bangkok this is an open city of parks and greenery. The Orchid Gardens and Lake Gardens on the west side of town spread extensively across rolling hills and are a real breath of fresh air. Here you could happily take a long morning run without being jostled, confined, bored or asphyxiated by clouds of blue smoke from a hundred motorcycles. We take a public bus back to the hotel, the driver calls back to us to make sure we know where we are going and drops us at the door.

But KL is not all green and peaceful. In the evening, strolling away from downtown we encounter an area with shophouses four or five stories high; screaming motorbikes and growling buses; litter; a store which loudly proffers plastic ticky tacky and giant boxes of detergent and Santa Claus outside doing a kind of Asian boogie with hand bells and claiming to have the best bargains in town; people filling the sidewalks walking, standing and sitting around at improvised cafes eating noodles, agitated. There are no coy Muslim ladies here. This is Chinese territory.

"Third class" evokes images of clinging to the side of the train or balancing on the roof, or at least sitting next to a large peasant who parks a wicker basket of live chickens on your lap. In fact it is fine and I quickly forget first class and begin to doubt whether the extra for the second class ticket would have been worthwhile. The seats are soft enough for the seven hour journey, there are ceiling fans ready to cool us if the breeze from the open windows fails in the afternoon. My fellow passengers are Muslims, quiet and unobtrusive except for an occasional belch from the silver-haired man behind me with a black, round Muslim hat and a Vic stuck up his nose. A KL businessman is in the seat beside me, on his way to see his wife who works in Singapore. I can't see any chickens, or prospective chicken carriers.

There is nothing spectacular from KL to the southern tip of the country. As we pull south through the suburbs we pass more shabby semi-rural shacks than our day in the city has led us to expect, each with a rusting corrugated metal roof, wood or metal walls and a sense of lingering poverty. The track is sometimes close to the highway, sometimes away on its own in unfrequented countryside. For a long period we pass parallel to a swathe cut from the plantations for a gas line, with red steel pipes strewn anyhow beside a half-completed ditch. Beyond there are the familiar, rolling hills of rubber and oil palm, planted on terraces dug into the hillsides. You wouldn’t see those terraces in Thailand, where the soil is rapidly slipping down the valleys and into the sea. In spite of those shacks you cannot escape the impression that not only is Malaysia further ahead but also that it is managing the development process more sensibly than Thailand is.

It is unfair to judge a place from a train window but Johore Bahru looks to be a dull parody of its near neighbour across the sea and my by now sticky seat is not so bad that I am tempted out of the carriage. There is an unobtrusive passport check on the train in the station and we trundle across the surprisingly short causeway to Singapore island.

Air travellers are greeted by one of the world’s most elegant airports and a highway which any city would be proud of, with bougainvillea on the overpasses and clear views of the freighters out in the South China Sea, watched over by tall, angular, majestic buildings.  Arriving by train is like coming in through the back door. We pass scruffy goods yards, the backs of factories, roads weaving over and under our track, idle land supporting wild, unidentifiable vegetation and an occasional unSingaporean rusty corrugated iron hut. We finally approach the city from the west, sneaking in at ground level between an elevated highway and marching rows of dull apartment blocks.

The railway seems to have been left out of the city’s otherwise comprehensive development plans. The splendid underground mass-transit line is of a different century, a different technology, a different ethic, and haughtily avoids our station by a kilometer or so.  Even the taxis seem indifferent and we wait in line for 30 minutes, after already waiting that long at immigration, impatient and sweating in the warmth of the early afternoon.

The journey back to Bangkok will take two hours. Was it worth taking three days to come by train? From a table in Peranakan Place and a cool glass, the anticlimax of the arrival reminds me that the goal for once was the experience of travelling, seeing the people and landscape close up, first hand, instead of through occasional breaks in the clouds and wondering if the captain will remember to tell you what you are flying over. Three days of stately progress with almost no effort, slower than a plane but quicker than a hotel, three days without hearing a telephone ring, three days to look and think and read as you please. Sure it was worth it.

	First class	Second class	Third class
KL	474	214	132
Singapore	960	433	266