Why we swapped the plane for the train, by Martin Blackledge

An original contemporary newspaper travel feature.

For years our family ski trip began with a four o’clock alarm, a dash to the airport and a coach that crawled up the mountain for three hours while somebody felt sick. This February we tried something different and went the whole way by train.

We left our house in Kent at seven in the morning and changed trains twice: once in London and once in Paris, where we had ninety minutes to cross the city between stations. I had imagined this as the stressful part. In fact, the walk through the streets with our wheeled bags was one of the best moments of the holiday, and we even had time to eat warm crêpes beside the river.

The final train climbed slowly into the mountains through the afternoon. The children, who are eleven and fourteen, spent the first hour on their screens and the next three with their faces pressed to the window, counting frozen waterfalls. We stepped onto the platform in the dark, eleven hours after leaving home, with snow falling softly under the station lights.

Was it cheaper? Not quite: the tickets cost about £60 more for the four of us than the flights would have done. But we could carry as much luggage as we liked, nobody queued at security, and the journey felt like part of the holiday rather than an ordeal to survive. Next year, my daughter has already announced, we are doing it again.

(a) In which city did the family have to cross from one station to another? (b) How long did the whole journey take? (c) Give one advantage of travelling by train that the writer mentions.