Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways

From Bangkok to Mandalay, Chris's journey takes him nearly 2,000 miles through some extraordinary places, rich in history and culture as well as stunning scenery, on a series of trains that push his love of travelling by rail to the limits.

From the tiny coastal town of Tocopilla, Chris rides one of the steepest railways in the world as he scales the first 1,000 metres of the Andes.

Chris sets out to reach the northernmost railway station on Earth in an epic 2000-mile adventure from Moscow into Arctic Siberia.

Chris attempts to cross the length of Cuba, the only island in the Caribbean to boast an extensive railway network, from Havana in the west to the far east of the island. Given old and battered trains that often fail to run, this proves rather more of a challenge than he had anticipated.

Chris journeys a thousand miles across Japan to find out if Japanese railways really are the best in the world. Along the way he meets one of the great architects of the bullet trains, a celebrity Station Master cat, a singing conductress and atomic bomb survivors who kept wartime trams running.

Chris discovers how a 2,500-mile transcontinental railway was built against huge odds in just a few decades, and turned a vast wilderness of isolated communities into the country we now know as Canada.