London–calcutta Bus Service

A friend of mine took this route in the 70's. It was not only relatively cheap but once you arrived in India you could live off the very generous UK Unemployment Benefit for a very long time as the exchange rate was incredible and the price of basics extremely cheap. He did it for several years before moving on to Japan. So he didn't need to take any time 'off' :)

I can't imagine spending two months on a bus.

Go spend some time on r/onebag. Every day there is a post by someone who is taking 3 months or 6 months to travel a few different countries. Usually younger people, but includes people who are taking a long break from work.

Or to put it another way. There were only a handful of such buses running simultaneously. So there were only a few hundred passengers per year. Is it hard to imagine that in the 3ish Billion people that live on that route today, you couldn't find 500 people who can take a few months off to do an epic journey through 20 countries?

Everything but lifespan I think. So Expected Value of life remains flat over time.

[delayed]

There also wasn't socialized healthcare

Well, I can travel around most of Europe without a passport right now? ID card will do just fine, even though, really, nobody ever asks me for that either.

Meanwhile, my life expectancy is, like at least twice that 'prior to WW1' and my disposable income at least 20 times my take-home pay in 1917.

Bloody EU, innit...

And much before that there were no passports. Maybe you have a point. Say Columbus et cetera :D

You just need a nuclear-powered Big Bus.

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w1066_and_h600_bestv2/l5n4h4gmRtj...

https://imcdb.org/i065460.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bus

"Cyclops has a passenger capacity of 110 and is equipped with a bowling alley, Asian-style cocktail lounge with a piano bar, swimming pool, Bicentennial dining room, private marble-and-gold bathroom with sunken tub, and chef's kitchen."

From Sofia to the West of Turkey should be relatively easy. After that, travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan will get hairy.

My Google Maps algo will be massively confused by my 'Directions' search: Sofia, Bulgaria to Calcutta, India on a Friday afternoon in January

Nit-pick: The year before :)

£2,589 for an all-inclusive 50-day bus-cruise, even today, doesn't seem that overly expensive. (~£50/day).

So it's not just inflation, it's "that used to be cheaper".

I guess on the flipside, travelling by plane in 1957 (or even 1974), would have been much more than £2,589.

That seemed high, so I plugged it into the bank of England's inflation calculator[1] and got:

> What cost £85.00 in 1957 would cost £1,796.12 in November 2025.

Not orders of magnitude off, but makes a little more sense this way. I wonder if there's a bug in wikipedia's inflation calculator.

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

There was heavy inflation in the seventies: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

That's impressive!

My grandmother took 2 or 3 of her kids, on her own, on the train from London to southern Italy a couple of times a year with the same kind of stoicism as people take the bus into town these days. They were built different

Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, describes a 1930s trip to present-day Afghanistan. But I believe he started the automobile portion in Tehran.

I took that once from SF to NYC when in my twenties. Definitely recommend.

Many years ago it was a great service to get to BM cheaply.

> A very different scale

Anchorage to Belize: 5777 miles

London to Kolkata: 5695 miles

Huh. I've seen that hostel in downtown Seattle for years now but never knew the story behind the brand.

> Green Tortoise Adventure Travel is an American long-distance tour bus company

> is

I usually find Wikipedia to be quite accurate when it comes to telling whether something is still operational/active or not, especially when it comes to businesses (among other things).

You definitely don’t take long distance Amtrak today for cost or convenience. You go for the experience and views. I had a blast sharing a room with a friend on the Seattle to Emeryville route. I’m looking at Chicago to Emeryville next (or starting in Denver along the same route).

You don't need to do it in one trip.

The equivalent of this would be interrailing through europe... travel via train to one country, stay for a few days, travel to next, stay a few days, and continue, all with a single ticket: https://www.interrail.eu/en/interrail-passes/global-pass

I have friends that take the long haul Amtrak route. One does it for environmental reasons. He also eats discarded food so as not to waste. Great guy. Just a bit of a nut.

Another travels by train with his wife because they are retired and both have knee problems that make sitting in a plane untenable.

But yeah, traveling by train in the US outside the Northeast corridor doesn't make except for unusual circumstances.

It followed the hippie trail, that was the motivation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail

The point is the travel. If you have the time, then this would have been a great way to see a lot of the world. It's a bit of an adventure by itself.

I can't say it would have been very comfortable, so I guess it would be trading time and comfort for money.

Can't believe you tried so hard to list reasons for taking the route, and missed an obvious one that other commenters suggested. Travel is not always just A->B as fast as possible.

Judging by the facilities mentioned in the Wikipedia article, it was very much planned as a (relatively) modern-day Orient Express. Not everyone back then had the luxury to not work for 50 days (one-way), so it was very much a rich people service.

Really, more expensive than flying? The family and I are looking at taking a X-country trip on AMTRAK and it looks to be significantly cheaper than flying. Plus, we will get to see awesome sights.

The Wikipedia article made it sound like more of a "land cruise". The bus stopped at some tourist and shopping destinations along the way and the description make it sound more like a cabin cruiser than your typical bus. I can see the appeal for people who want to travel and don't have a lot of money. Definitely easier than hitchhiking across the continent.

The same reason why people take month long road trips anywhere, it's to see everything on the way. I'd guess their clients were 20 year olds wanting to go on an adventure. Honestly, if this had been a thing when I was 21 and out of college and a friend asked me to go I probably would have.

What if you want to enjoy the scenery?

drug and sex tourism

The other motivation would be getting to see - albeit briefly - all of the countries in between.

If I had 50 days to spare I might choose that over a flight too!

Amtrak is not for someone that simply wants to get from A to B. I suspect a 50-day bus trip would be the same.

When I take Amtrak, it’s because I want to look out of a window for a few dozen hours and see something new (to me) every time I look out the window.

It’s probably the bus trip that they want, and not simply “go to India.”

For the most part, the purpose of the long haul Amtrak services isn't to make it economical go from one end of the line / one major city to the other (e.g. NYC to Chicago); It's to provide a transportation service for all the intermediate, rural stations who might not be near an airport or have any other public transportation options.

"There is just absolutely no reason to travel that way."

Some people liked to see all these places and meet people. The journey itself would be an adventure. The other alternative would be by sea.

I used to know someone who travelled to India overland long before the Beatles made it fashionable for westerners to visit.

Depends on the type of tourism you prefer, I absolutely love roadtrips because "journey is more important than the destination", it's an adventure and the best memories from trips I have are from the journey itself, the destination is just a cherry on top.

I took the Amtrak from Chicago to SF and it was the highlight of that year for me and one of the best memories of my life. Eating breakfast as we snaked by the Colorado river with fresh snow on the rocks - that's a travel experience.

I once took Amtrack from Chicago-Seattle-San Francisco-Los Angeles-San Antonio-Chicago. With side-trips to Madison WI, Vancouver and to Yosemite (via Green Tortoise company).

It was a 6 week vacation, the purpose was to travel and see the US. I enjoyed it very much!

Road is the destination, thus you arrive a changed man, ready for the Indian sub-universe to experience and mold you further.

And specifically on this, clashing with a very exotic cultures and mindsets along the way, forming unexpected intense interactions and experiences that you will remember for the rest of your life.

I've done a similar thing to this since this specifically wasn't possible anymore without crossing battlefields and risking kidnapping and death - backpacking around India for 6 months together. No real destination or plan, just 1 thick Lonely planet book covering whole country in the backpack (this was 2008 and 2010), return ticket and fixed budget in cash.

Came back a bit different, dare I say in some ways enlightened person. Experience cannot be explained to others by mere words, but other folks who experienced similar understand without a word.

Or being a "nomad" type who considers the journey itself as an end.

Fits the hippie age quite well.

Says so right in the opening paragraphs:

> became famously associated with the overland Hippie Trail of the 1960s and 1970s

By way of comparison, it took pilgrims from England traveling on ships like the Mayflower about 66 days to arrive in New England.

iirc it was more doing it for the experience than as a convenient mode of travel (and actually if you run the maths/do some estimation, the journey time would be much shorter if they were driving 24/7 - like 5-10 days maybe)

I’m surprised you’ve missed the most important reason of all. The very journey and the time spent on it is the point I would imagine for a large majority of the folks. It’s an adventure. What sort of person misses this?

Thanks, I love solo travel books.

You can still drive your own private car the entire way. And there are trains you can take.

What would a non-genuine reason look like?

Not this but Golden Chariot (and Palace on Wheels - not sure this one still runs) was a dream since I was a student. When I could afford it, I was no longer interested. A few people I know took those rides and had nothing extraordinary to say of it. The prices are in USD so I guess it’s literally the “Raj Trip” trap for the foreigners and that’s what I heard from those few Indians I know who travelled in these. For the ultra rich Indian it holds no pull, and the rich Indians - they’d rather go elsewhere in that cost than cross the same tracks and platforms knowing fully well what lies below 2 feet and around it, in fact they can damn picture it in HD

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

London–Calcutta Bus Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40649091 - June 2024 (117 comments)

These are photos of the Indiaman service, operated by Garrow-Fisher starting in 1957. The Wikipedia article conflates details of this service with another one, the Albert, operated by Albert Travel, which started in 1968. I noticed the discrepancy because the photos are of a single-decker bus, not a double-decker.

See here for much better Wikipedia article that keeps the details straight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_b...

Most people never did it.

You can do Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Beijing by train via the trans-Siberian, or via Ulan-Bataar with the trans-Mongolian.

Quite an iconic route that became much simpler administratively to travel in 2000s but perhaps again trickier now because of the situation with Russia.