Previous Tours

Having spent the last 50 years travelling thousands of miles around the world by train, how do you choose your top ten rail journeys?

We welcome a second travel blog from David Grosvenor, an artist based in North Wales, who returned to travelling further afield with gusto this year by joining two of Festiniog Travel’s Small & Traditional escorted holidays. In this write-up David offers further, frank insight into our ‘away from the tourist trail’ tours when he travelled with a small group to Albania (including visits to Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia) to explore this mountainous and sparsely populated country and encountered a very warm welcome, delicious food and spectacular scenery that he struggled to find the words for!

A regular traveller with Ffestiniog Travel, David Grosvenor has shared his thoughts and photographs of our recent escorted tour to Kyrgyzstan. This Small and Traditional tour is the most remote destination in Ffestiniog Travel’s tour portfolio and certainly lives up to its ‘small and traditional’ tour status. A small group departed on this inaugural tour in July 2022 followed quickly by a second departure in the same month due to popular demand. David provides a candid account of his experience in Kyrgyzstan in this travel blog, which also serves to capture the authenticity of our Small & Traditional tour range. These escorted tours visit countries that still remain untouched by large scale tourism and discover remote areas, true nature, rich culture and wonderful history with the services of a knowledgeable local guide. David describes his words as “a personal blog written during this amazing tour.”

One of our regular and popular escorted tours explores scenic regions that surround the mighty Rhine river in Germany and is run to coincide with one of the country’s most culturally important events in the calendar year – the ‘Rhine in Flammen’ Festival. This is a very relaxing 5-day holiday, and our next visit will be based in one of Germany’s oldest cities, Bonn. In this blog, tour leader John Robson, offers an insight into this short European break and why it is worth considering joining us when we run it again in 2022!

Ffestiniog Travel tour leader John Robson has penned another blog to share his experience and expertise of navigating the comprehensive Harz Railway network that weaves its way through Germany’s beautiful Harz Mountains. Ffestiniog Travel have been running escorted and arranging tailored rail holidays to the Harzer-Schmalspurbahnen (HSB) for over 30 years and the popularity of this destination shows no sign of waning. It appeals both to the rail enthusiast and partners in equal measure due to the abundance of steam-hauled locos and the scenic charms of the region. In this blog John offers some insights into how you can make the best of your time on this wonderful and extensive railway playground.

This blog by Ffestiniog Travel tour leader, John Robson, brings to life one of our popular tours, a circular rail journey around Ireland, which he led in 2018 – a recollection from the viewpoint of a tour leader! Let John’s words and memories transport you on a written journey through the ‘Emerald Isle’!

The Telegraph described Uzbekistan as the “most fascinating country you’ve never been to” with only an estimated 1,000 Britons visiting each year. Ffestiniog Travel has been running an annual escorted tour to the country since 2017 and the destination is gaining interest among a growing number of tourists as red tape surrounding the former Soviet Union country eases. The country has so much to offer, some of the most beautiful cities in Central Asia and an interesting history along the famous Silk Road. This blog has been written by Ian Handley, a Ffestiniog Traveller, who joined one our Uzbekistan tours. He was drawn to the railway element we included in the tour itinerary and shares his experience of the train and transport systems of the country.

A rail tour of India's remarkable Hill Station railways offers both the enthusiast and general train tourist a wonderful opportunity to experience a piece of India and railway history. To cover the Shimla, Darjeeling and Nilgiri Hill Railways in the timeframe of a regular holiday - in this case 3-weeks - requires a lot of travelling, as Ffestiniog Travel guest David Peel, found out. But the sightseeing content and railway experiences certainly made it a worthwhile odyssey. David shares his thoughts of Ffestiniog Travel's 2017 Indian Hill Railways tour in this unedited, candid account!

Ffestiniog Travel actively encourages its customers to offer feedback on the tours and holidays they have taken with us and the more elaborate the better! So again we welcome another customer blog to these pages and one that captures the essence of our annual pilgrimage to India, combining journeys on the wonderful Hill Station Railways with visiting some of the Sub-Continent’s notable landmarks. This travel blog by Dave Firth chronicles his experience of our 2016 India Tour in which he describes the practical elements of the holiday, the interesting stops along the way and of course the railway journeys themselves!