Travel: Five go off the rails in Europe: 'Architecture or love: both were possible': The pounds 180 InterRail card is a passport to young adventure, a training for life. Our travellers give us the benefit of their hindsight

Travelled in 1974

WHAT would you choose if you were 18? Steam trains, Greek Revival architecture or love? Could they possibly be combined in one summer railway trip around Europe? Could I be with my Aphrodite (Venus with a blonde ponytail) while steaming past Leo von Klenze's Doric Walhalla, an 1830s Parthenon lookalike above the Danube at Regensburg?

I must have been determined to try. I pored feverishly over maps and timetables, plotted a path through the intricacies of the European rail network and decided that all things were possible.

I had an address of a German girl I had met some weeks before at a party in London. She said come and stay; I said I would. She lived near Reichenbach, a village in the Naturpark Oberpfalzer Wald, about ten miles from Regensberg, conveniently close to Von Klenze's fabulous Walhalla which I had dreamt of seeing since I was 11 or 12.

Sadly, the trains from London to Regensberg were either diesel or electric all the way. Mainline steam trains were as rare as easy girls. The only places to find them were around Kiel on the north German coast and, if you were lucky, from Marseilles to Nice along the Cotes des Calanques and the Cote d'Azure.

Kiel and the flat north German coast held little appeal; the Cote d'Azure did. So this is what happened and why my InterRail trip went wrong and then right.

It was changing trains at Strasbourg that did it. I telephoned Reichenbach from the station. No, she wasn't there. She was away hiking with her cousins and no, nobody knew I was coming. I sat on my holdall and let the train that would have taken me to Bavaria growl away from the low continental platform.

I must have been sad or wistful for about 20 minutes when a train rolled in from the opposite direction and screeched to a halt. It was heading to Berne. It was the sudden realisation that InterRail macht frei that made me pick up my bag and hop aboard. Why worry about Reichenbach? I was free to go wherever I wanted to, anywhere in the whole of Europe.

So I hurtled south, reading pretentious paperbacks, not sleeping and drinking coffee on long trains that took me along lakes, through mountains and down to the sea and the South of France.

Nice gave me a suntan and the sight of black SNCF 2-8-2s hauling heavy olive-green trains of holidaymakers into and out of the station. A girl was struggling with her luggage; she carried one of the same difficult paperbacks that I did, which seemed like a cue.

And so a fortnight of steam trains and teenage love came my way courtesy of InterRail. The Neo-Greek architecture I was missing gave way to the white Modern villas of Le Corbusier. She was an architecture student and she was very Modern. I think I must have been very happy. Curiously, I have yet to go to Regensberg and see Von Klenze's Walhalla.