Riding with the Rail Guru

Ed Gillespie meets The Man in Seat 61

“That’s good – it’s buying me a curry.” Mark Smith’s reaction to the first payment he received for ‘The Man in Seat 61’ (www.seat61.com) is somehow typical of the man behind this pioneering train travel advice site [see box below]. Surfing on the back of a surge of interest in slow, low-carbon travel, Seat61 now attracts half a million visitors a month. Mark modestly declines to reveal how much it’s making from affiliate scheme payments and the like. But it did enable him to give up his day-job at the Department for Transport last autumn… It was a big but liberating leap.

Rejecting the notion of a ‘lifestyle business’ (“I hate the term”), he does confess to feeling guilty, in a very British way, about making money from what started as a hobby. “I half expect someone to turn around and say ‘That’s enough of that, sonny, time to get a real job’. It doesn’t feel like work, but I love the fact I no longer have to commute, that the information I give is free and always will be, and that it enables me to travel.”

And travelling we are. I’m interviewing Mark as he sits in Seat 61, his favourite spot in the first class Eurostar carriage that gave the site its name. We’re speeding through Flanders’ fields to Brussels to enjoy Moules Frites and Trappist beer.

The website began rather humbly back in 2001 following a debate with a film producer cousin about what movie character they’d play. Mark settled on the enigmatic ‘Man in Seat 61’. A few days later he picked up a ‘Teach Yourself HTML’ book and created his first web pages, outlining rail routes from London to several key European cities, and boldly announcing: “Do you know you can reach Africa by train in 48 hours?” An email from the Guardian’s travel editor followed, to which Mark’s first reaction was “Which one of my friends is winding me up now?” But the enquiry was genuine and his site was made their ‘Website of the Week’ in May 2001.

It was all the encouragement Mark needed, as he began to appreciate that his voice wasn’t just a ‘cry in the wilderness’. Motivated by the paradox that ‘it’s so easy to travel by train, yet so hard to find out how to do it’, he spent a couple of hours a day developing the site during his journey to work, building it up into something extremely impressive in both its detail and its accessible, down-to-earth tone.

A glimpse at Seat 61’s guest book is testimony to the appreciation of his visitors. It’s a gushing deluge of gratitude, and disbelief that the comprehensive, practical information has all been collated by one man, serving a market utterly failed by rail companies and travel agents. There are good reasons for this, as Mark, with his old rail regulator’s hat on, explains. “Eurostar is not interested in selling tickets beyond Paris; similarly there’s little benefit or incentive to encourage cross-selling of tickets between different European train companies. The travel world, whether it’s business or leisure, wants to push you towards flying, as it’s too much hassle to organise the alternatives.”

It’s because of these frustrating institutional barriers that people want Mark to ‘hand-hold’ them through the often archaic ticketing processes of the global rail industry. His site attracts a mixture of train enthusiasts, those that are mortally afraid or just fed up of flying, and folk who, like me, have consciously forsaken aviation for environmental reasons.

On the train vs plane debate Mark is scathing, describing the current growth in short-haul flights as “totally ludicrous”. He’s swift to point out the flaws in the time and cost arguments that superficially favour flying. “The cost of a cheap flight doesn’t include airport tax, luggage fee or transport to and from the airport either end, so comparing only direct ticket prices is unfair. Equally, flying doesn’t always save you time”, argues Mark, expounding on the advantages of city centre to city centre travel and the comfort of Spanish ‘train hotels’. ‘To arrive in Barcelona for a morning meeting you’d either have to fly out at the crack of dawn, or the day before and have a night in a hotel. By train the cost of the hotel is included and you’re asleep for most of the journey. You don’t check into a hotel and say ‘How many hours does this hotel take?’”

So how can we bring about a revolution in rail travel and lure people off planes? “We need to level the playing field and tax aviation fuel. Taxes should be proportionate to carbon intensity. They are supposed to correct market failure, and global warming is potentially the biggest market failure in history.”

As for the future of his site, Mark is confident that it has reached a critical mass that a bigger, commercial rival would find hard to emulate. Seat61 is not a booking service and Mark has no intention of turning it into one. “It won’t make me a millionaire”, he shrugs, “but as long as it pays the mortgage I’m happy. The site helps people and sustains my family. What could be better?”

Ed Gillespie, Creative Director of Futerra, is working on a book about slow travel. He and Mark travelled to Brussels courtesy of Eurostar. Tickets from St Pancras or Ebbsfleet to anywhere in Belgium normally cost from £59 return.

28 June 2008

Ed Gillespie