Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on September 02, 2002 at 12:13:46 from 194.112.55.116 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: How did Commander Walker get to Flushing? posted by Adam Quinan on September 01, 2002 at 17:58:51:
To get to Basra he would have had to change ship, in India, disemarking from his P&O and embarking on a BI ship. Possible, but was the railway still running then?
People quite commonly embarked and disembarked from P&O steamers at Marseilles to cut out the passage round Spain and across Biscay, but that does not give a 12 days journey and he would have changed at Paris (onto the Golden Arrow, perhaps) rather than Berlin.
A route to Britain from China which was much favoured in the 1930's was across the Pacific, across Canada and across the Atlantic all on Canadian Pacific, which was reckoned to be faster than the P&O via the Indian Ocean. But that would not get him to Berlin.
I think it must have been the Trans-Siberian, which would involve starting from Hong Konmg on the KCR, changing at Canton, and again at Peking, and again at the Russian border and then at Moscow. At the European end, a journey from Moscow across European Russia and then Poland, then Germany, would be needed.