Veteran broadcaster and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? presenter Chris Tarrant may be more used to sitting opposite the hot seat, but for the past three years, he has thrown himself head first into all manner of precarious situations for his TV series Extreme Railways, which has seen him traverse the globe. "We've now travelled 168,212 miles," he says, "which is probably why I look completely knackered."
Despite the name of the programme, Tarrant admits he's never been that excited about trains themselves; rather it's the stories behind them – and, of course, the chance to visit parts of the world he's never seen.
"I've never been a trainspotter as such, but I love the way railways link countries together. When we were in places like India, Bolivia or the Congo, without a particular rail link, people would live and die in the same village and would never have been able to travel, as there were no roads and no access to planes," he says. "I'm just fascinated by railways and the more we covered and the more countries we went to, the more extraordinary I thought they were. You think, 'My God, how did they build this?'"
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Over the three series, the journeys have ranged from the extremely advanced – "the bullet trains in Japan are just amazing to look at; like Concorde, they're quite beautiful. We used a speedometer app on our phone and it was doing 208 miles per hour and we just carried on chatting as normal" – to the plain extreme: "In Zimbabwe, where a lot of the trains just didn't run, you'd get to the station and there would be signs up saying 'no trains'. When we were travelling from Bulawayo, we did get a train that was working and it was going quite fast. But when we were going along, the doors kept flying open – I'd never seen anything like it. You could have easily fallen out of the doors. I'm sure people did because during the night, there were strange bumps. We travelled all night and I'm sure there weren't as many people when we got off as when we got on."
Such close encounters were par for the course. Tarrant jokes that waiting six days for a train in the thick jungle of the Congo was "a good start to the series". When it finally arrived, it proceeded to stop still in a tunnel. "Breaking down in the middle of the night in the Congo is quite scary. We started to walk towards a village in the dark around 2am, and that was quite frightening, but it was alright in the end."
His most hair-raising experience, however, involved a different form of transport altogether. "In Canada, one of the big problems they have is keeping the railways running all year, especially for freight. It's down to avalanches, massive rock falls; with luck they wipe out big chunks of line, but at worst they wipe out whole trains and passenger coaches," he explains.
"One of the things they do is go up in a helicopter – and I don't like helicopters much anyway – with big sticks of dynamite and if they see points where the snow is really impacting and liable to build up into an avalanche, they blow it up at source. I'd never held a stick of dynamite in my life and we're in this helicopter going way up over the Rocky Mountains, which is some way up, over some seriously jagged peaks. Suddenly there's a massive blizzard right across the windscreen and we couldn't see anything at all. Then the helicopter starts making this noise, and the pilot says it means we're going down too fast. I thought, 'We're going down too fast over the Rocky Mountains, I'm holding sticks of dynamite and we're all going to die.' Then things suddenly cleared and you could see the valleys and mountains. The whole thing probably took less than a minute, but we were genuinely frightened."
As the series enters its third outing, are there any extreme railway journeys left to take? "There can't be many places in the world we haven't done. I need a break – I've worked a bit too hard in the past couple of years, more than I'm supposed to. I enjoy the travelling, but I like to be home with my missus and my kids. I'm doing a Christmas special and then I'll go off to the Caribbean for a month and see what I think. It's not a bad life."
Chris Tarrant's Extreme Railway Journeys is out on 3 November (John Blake Books, £20). Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways airs on Channel 5 at 9pm on Mondays; johnblakebooks.com; channel5.com
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