Railway trips to dine for

I don't believe in the good old days. Despite the many crises that plague us – global terrorism, climate change, economic collapse, Facebook – I think the 21st century is a great time to be alive. We travel to places our parents couldn't find on a map; survive diseases that would have killed our grandparents; and eat foods we'd never heard of 20 years ago. But even I am willing to admit there are a few things our predecessors did better than us – and one of them is the railway dining car. I love the sensation of sitting at a formally set dining table, served by elegantly clad waiters, while foreign landscapes slide past your picture window. Compare that with your last airline meal – trying to cut overcooked chicken with a plastic knife, without elbowing your neighbour in the ribs. There's no contest.

Sadly, the full-service dining car has become something of a rarity. To start with, you need a long journey in a country that takes mealtimes seriously. But even then, there are no guarantees. When I booked myself a first-class sleeper berth on a train from Delhi to Kerala, in India's south – a trip that supposedly took three days, but in fact turned out to be more like four – I had visions in my head of never-ending Indian banquets. And indeed, we regularly chowed down on multi-course meals that included two types of curry, dhal, rice and chapatti, plus water to wash it down. Unfortunately, these repasts were served to us in our cabin, presented rather inelegantly on a tin tray. The water, curiously, was delivered in a plastic pouch. On the upside, it provided hours of entertainment, as I worked out how to: a) open it; and b) drink from it without pouring most of it over myself. By the time I'd mastered the art, we'd reached our destination.

So I was looking forward to experiencing a real Russian old-school railway dining car. And indeed, the trappings were as promised: tables decorated with art deco lamps, thick curtains held back with tasselled ropes. I was in heaven – until I opened the menu.

Now, it's true that Russia is not a nation known for its culinary skills. It's true also that menus sometimes lose something in the translation. However, it would be hard to imagine a more unappealing selection of dishes than that on offer in the dining car. Memorable choices included compound meat soup and scrag with trimmings (I'm not making this up). After perusing several pages and failing to find anything that sounded edible, we finally gave in and ordered up a traditional Russian dinner: a bottle of vodka.

The presentation was superb – our waiter lovingly decanted it into a beautiful cut-glass serving jug – but as a dining experience, it lacked a certain something. Food, to be precise.

The best antidote for a bad dining-car experience is a journey aboard the Hiram Bingham, a luxury train that travels from Peru's Sacred Valley up to the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. Some people like to do a four-day trek up to Machu Picchu. For those who prefer a four-course meal, there's the Hiram Bingham. This is a train that's dedicated to fine food. It consists of two dining cars, a kitchen car and an observation bar car. That's it.

In the morning, as the train winds its way along the Urubamba River up to Machu Picchu town, passengers down glasses of sparkling wine as they work their way through a multi-course brunch, including roast alpaca with elderberry compote, cannelloni, and passionfruit cheesecake. After a day exploring the ruins, you hop on the train for a five-course dinner. Now that's what I call a train journey.

Of course, the longer the train journey, the easier it is to become fixated on meals. More than merely a chance to refuel, they become the equivalent of inflight entertainment. On a three-week trip from Beijing to Moscow, aboard the Trans-Mongolian Railway, my travelling companions and I derived most of our entertainment from alighting briefly at every station, just to see what sort of food was for sale.

At one midnight stop at a station near the Chinese border, we hit the jackpot – a small store crammed with oddly illustrated packets that resembled nothing with which we were familiar. We worked our way through a succession of mystery foodstuffs that offered varying taste sensations. The cucumber-flavoured crisps tasted quite pleasant, and were also refreshing in a way that chips usually aren't. The pea-flavoured ice-cream, on the other hand, tasted like something you'd scrape out of your bathroom grouting.

Many of the smaller Russian stations had no shops at all. Instead, we'd find a handful of babushkas standing on the platform, holding plastic bags of the food they'd prepared earlier. In some cases, it was dumplings, stuffed with cabbage. In others, it was pies, stuffed with cabbage. In one memorable instance, one of the old ladies tried to interest us in buying a live crayfish she had stashed in a crate. When we declined, she pulled a boiled crayfish out of her apron, and tried to interest us in that instead.

Theoretically, of course, we could have been eating in the dining car. In fact, one of the things I'd most looked forward to about the journey was the succession of meals I imagined we'd enjoy: piles of spicy noodles as we passed the Great Wall of China, big bowls of borscht as we wound our way through Siberian forests, and as we travelled through the Mongolian steppe – well, I never quite worked out what they'd feed us in Mongolia.

Sadly, we ate surprisingly few meals in the dining car, although not for want of trying. As we chugged our way through China, we made several attempts to enter the dining car. Each time we tried, however – whether it was at 11am or 11pm – the carriage was packed with Chinese families. Each family seemed to consist of half a dozen adults and an equal number of children, all smoking furiously (even, it seemed, the children) while tucking into huge amounts of grease-laden food.

In Russia, by contrast, the dining car tended to be completely empty. We soon found out why.

On our first visit, only one table was occupied. It was a typical Russian gathering: three men, two bottles of vodkas and an endless supply of cigarettes. Despite the lack of customers, it took us half an hour to coax the uninterested waitress into bringing us a menu – an extensive document of about a dozen pages, in both Cyrillic and English.

Having delivered the menu, the waitress disappeared for another half an hour. It was only when she delivered yet another bottle of vodka to the Russians that we were able to grab her and try to order: an exercise in frustration. We spent 15 increasingly desperate minutes attempting to order a range of dishes, each of which the waitress countered with a bored, "Nyet." Finally, we gave up trying to choose a dish for ourselves, and simply asked her what we could have. She pointed at a menu entry in Cyrillic and sauntered off. We didn't see her again for another 90 minutes.

We did eventually get fed. After about three quarters of an hour, my friends wanted to leave, but I pointed out that, with Moscow another three days away, we didn't really have anywhere to go. And in the end, our patience was rewarded – with a plate of lukewarm fried potatoes. Not the most satisfying dining experience I've ever had on a train, but certainly one of the most memorable.