The way to San Jose leaves at 5pm, once daily, from Calderas. And if you want to follow the (rail) road to Mandalay you can do it five times a day, for about $31 from Rangoon.
Whether you're looking for a train in Paris or Paraguay, or even -- heaven forbid! -- a bus, the ultimate tool is published monthly by a crew of inveterate trainspotters in the UK: the Thomas Cook Timetables. For 133 years, they've pulled together pretty much every train schedule on Earth (and quite a few of the buses) into two indispensable books, one red (for Europe) and one blue (for everywhere else.)
Paper timetables may seem archaic in the age of the Internet, but these books beat trying to track down Madrid regional rail flyers any day. They're unusually portable, entirely in English, and startlingly complete. You won't find the route from Barcelona up to the French border to connect with the tourist "yellow train" listed properly on the Spanish railways' or Rail Europe's site -- but the Thomas Cook timetables get it right. And once you delve into the Overseas Timetable, you get a lot of stuff that's difficult to find in English anywhere at all (such as, say, ferry schedules in Mali.)
The Cookers also boil things down. They don't list every town a train stops at, picking the most important ones; "it is said that we are not timetable compilers but timetable compactors," says Overseas Timetable editor Peter Bass. They also err on the side of more, rather than fewer schedules: even if they don't have times for a service that they think might be running, they list a blank timetable with contact information for the bus or train company. They also take readers' suggestions into account when adding stations to their already-packed lists, says Brendan Fox, editor of the European timetable.
This all makes the timetables the ultimate companion for, say, Frommer's Europe By Rail and a rail pass. With the book in your pocket, you can change your plans at any moment without having to worry about how to figure out when the next train or bus is arriving.
Researching a trip to Nova Scotia this summer, I found a mysteriously blank timetable for the railway line running to Port Hawkesbury, NS. A call to VIA Rail, the Canadian railway operator, showed it was for a train that had been discontinued. But flipping back a few pages in the Thomas Cook timetable, I found a bus that trawls the same route. As it isn't run by VIA Rail, I wouldn't have been able to find that bus on their Web site.
So how do these guys get their data? Anyone can troll the web, but Thomas Cook's researchers are busy writing letters to companies like Shire Bus, who send them schedules for buses in Malawi, and corresponding with the officially named Captain Asif Ali in Pakistan who fills them in on rail trends there, according to Bass. Where there are no paper timetables, correspondents send them photographs of schedule boards from train stations. They even know a guy who knows a guy who insists that, yes, there's at least supposed to be a 6:30 from Baghdad to Basra every morning -- though he doesn't suggest you take it "without a military escort."
Getting the timetables isn't the end of the story. The China Railways timetables takes at least five weeks to process, Bass says, because, well, it's in Chinese. Continual changes in the world's transport systems ensure continual updates: the European book comes out monthly, while the more complex Overseas tome arrives every two months.
You'll have to order the Thomas Cook timetables directly from the UK, as they aren't sold in US bookstores. Each timetable costs £11.25 ($22.50) online -- but remember, you're getting more than 400 pages of schedules in very small print, so it's a bargain at the price. Order them from Thomas Cook's website.
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