Planning and preparation

Sunday 29 August 2010

Two years ago, I was commissioned to write a series on European Rail Travel. The month-long trip was highly successful. Tourist boards and hotel groups could not have been more enthusiastic in supporting the venture and I could have spent three or four months trying to visit all the destinations that were offered. A series of four weekly features ran in the Saturday magazine of England's biggest regional daily paper, the Eastern Daily Press, its sister title, the East Anglian Daily Times and several others. I did radio weekly radio reports as well as pre and post trip interviews.

I was paid for writing them, not much, but enough to cover my expenses. I have subsequently sold many of my photographs to a wide range of organisations, from tourist boards and hotel groups to newspapers, magazines and to Eurail, who provided the First Class Global Rail Pass.
Eurail offered me the opportunity to do another trip last year, but an over full diary meant that it had to be deferred until September 2010.

But what a difference a couple of years makes. Having done a lot of rail travel in Continental Europe over the past couple of years, plus extensive trips around Scotland in 2009, I decided to theme the 2010 journey ‘Coastal Rail Journeys of southern UK and near Europe. I promoted the journey in exactly the same way as before but despite a hugely enthusiastic initial response, tourist boards have either trimmed down their involvement or, in several cases, cited ‘no available budget to pay for accommodation’.

That in itself would not have been a problem, had the media world itself not had to cope with shrinking advertising. That meant no payments at all for writing or broadcasting about the trip from the commissions I have received.

But, like theatre, the show must go on with an itinerary that has been very much amended from that initially proposed.

On the downside, I am not now spending as much time in Devon, Dorset, Cornwall and on the English east coast as I had originally planned; Wales has had to be dropped completely. But the financial squeeze is still allowing a great itinerary, which includes good stretches of the English coast, several preserved railways and short forays into Normandy, Holland and Denmark.

Live Luggage (www.liveluggage.com) have kindly loaned me one of their 2012 sports bags, pictured in this first Blog, and it will be very interesting to see how the innovative design of this bag, with its two detachable front sections, works getting on and off trains. The bag weighs over 10 kilos empty, but is ‘designed to put 85% of the weight over its wheels’ so, its ‘anti-gravity handle’ and large wheels makes it actually feel very lightweight.

On Wednesday of this week I shall find out whether the reality matches the PR!