Monisha Rajesh, whose hymn to the night train, Moonlight Express (Bloomsbury), came out last week, is also editor of a forthcoming anthology being published to mark the 200th anniversary of the opening of the first passenger line, the Stockton & Darlington Railway (on September 27, 1825). In The Untold Railway Stories (Duckworth, £22, September 11), she and 11 other writers offer tales of trains, passengers and global history, “exploring the connective joy of railways as well as… complex backstories and politics”.

Rajesh herself hears from Simon Gronowski, a lawyer, jazz pianist, author and Holocaust survivor, who at the age of 11 was helped by his mother to escape from a train bound for Auschwitz. Other contributors include Andrew Martin, with a celebration of station gardens in Britain, Clare Hammond, on an old British hill station in Myanmar that has morphed into an elite military suburb, and Shahnaz Habib (whose Airplane Mode was one of my books of the year for 2024), who follows by train the westward expansion of settlers in the United States.

Both Rajesh and Martin will be among speakers at the FTWeeekend Festival next Saturday (September 6) at Kenwood House in London. Other contributors include Sophy Roberts, whose latest book is A Training School for Elephants; Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent (The Finest Hotel in Kabul); and Levison Wood, who will talk about his adventures everywhere from the Nile to the Himalayas.

When planning his travels, Sir Michael Palin says, he has “always been attracted to countries whose problems seem to outweigh their potential”. For his hundredth trek overseas, he settled on Venezuela, whose president seems determined to stay in power at all costs, and whose citizens have suffered so much in recent years that more than seven million have fled abroad. Many have since been deported illegally from the US and sent to a jail in El Salvador.

In his documentary series, which is due to air on Channel 5 later this month, Palin is drenched by the spectacular Angel Falls, visits one of Caracas’s worst slums, and arouses the suspicions of armed members of the Intelligence Service. Maybe Channel 5 should bring it forward. As I write, US warships are heading towards Venezuela, in what the Trump administration says is an anti-drug trafficking operation, prompting the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, to vow that his country is well prepared to defend its “peace, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Palin’s diary of his three-week visit in February, Michael Palin in Venezuela, will be published on September 25 (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20).