TRAVELERS EXPERIENCES IN RAIL TOURISM AMONG SPECIAL INTEREST TOURIST IN SABAH MALAYSIA: THEORETICAL REVIEW

Rail sometimes serves mainly as a transportation corridor connecting rural areas, or urban settings and green strips. However, the rise in the tourism industry in a developed country has increased the popularity of trails used in recreation. Apart from that, rail travel can be experienced as an enhancement of travel especially the onboard journey. Even though the rail tourism industry is well developed around the world, the studies related to rail travel in Malaysia are less plentiful. Therefore, this paper aims to review the idea of traveller’s experiences in rail tourism and identify the factors that contribute to rail tourism in Sabah Malaysia, especially among Special Interest Tourists (SITs). SITs can be defined as a specialized style of touristy that focuses on one topic and personally conducted tour by folks that wish to develop their interests. A content analysis on rail tourism, traveller’s experience, and the dimension of rail services was conducted for this paper. This is also involved an interview with the stakeholder to clarify and explain the features of rail tourism based on the content analysis and literature review. As for that, it's pointed out that the features and characteristics of the rail tourism setting as the variables of development criteria can make the touring route from the railway station is a pleasurable experience for tourists. It will give an impact on the experience and generate the intention of travellers to revisit and experience the services again. The final theoretical framework has been developed to show the concept of rail tourism among Special Interest Tourists (SITs) in Sabah Malaysia.

Being a Chinese Passenger: Practicing Quality and Civilization on the Rail

This article examines how everyday practices materialize abstract discourses of social “quality” within the spaces of the Chinese rail system. Rail travel remains a primary mode of transportation in China, competitive on cost and comfort—though not at the same time. This article brings together geographies of skill and mobility to examine how the skilled practice of rail travel produces high and low “quality” bodies and spaces within the rail network. Drawing on Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” to shed light on how movement creates cultural landscape at the national scale, I argue that the growing socio-economic gap within China has led to the emergence of distinct and incompatible traveling practices within the rail ridership. The conflict between a “lacking” ridership relying on mutual tolerance and a “quality” ridership prioritizing self-containment been resolved by the construction of high-speed rail as a separate network, segregating “high” and “low” quality riderships while still serving both.

A Lost City and its Time Machine: Vision and Affect in Rail Travel to Machu Picchu

Research on tourism to Machu Picchu rarely addresses the ways in which transportation, particularly rail travel, is integral to a visit to the UNESCO world heritage site. Yet the majority of visitors to Machu Picchu arrive by train, making rail travel a crucial component to the way in which the site is understood and experienced. This article examines rail travel to Machu Picchu through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cuzco and at Machu Picchu to argue that rail travel capitalizes on historic and cultural imaginings of Machu Picchu as a lost city, transforming the tourist into an explorer in the process. The experience relies on vision and affect as the train acts a temporalizing machine, taking the tourist back in time to visit another world, perpetuating the myth of lost cities, discovery and dispossession in the process.

Rail-based Public Transport Service Quality and User Satisfaction – A Literature Review

While rail-based public transport is clearly a more advanced and preferable alternative to driving and a way of overcoming traffic congestion and pollution problems, the rate of uptake for rail travel has remained stagnant as a result of various well-known issues such as that commuters either use a more reliable and comfortable alternative to get from A to B and/or that they are not satisfied with the quality of service provided. This study examined the factor of user satisfaction regarding rail-based public transport with the aim of discovering precisely what factors have a significant effect on the user satisfaction and uptake of rail travel. This was approached using both the Delphi approach and a thorough review of the current literature, focusing on a total of nine possible factors affecting passenger satisfaction with rail travel availability of service, accessibility of service, ticket or pass, punctuality, clarity of information, quality of customer service, comfort, safety, and image. Also discussed were 29 extra possible attributes and several measures that were implemented in various countries to increase the service quality. It was concluded that this review will provide valuable information for policymakers, researchers and service providers in terms of specifying the service factors most worth investigating if the quality of this crucial means of transport is to be raised.

Modelling the Impacts of Inter-City Connectivity on City Specialisation

There is a high level of interest in investing in inter-city connectivity schemes. The rationale for these schemes is improved economic performance through increased productivity, jobs, and output. The mobility costs of switching between sectors for labour and capital may limit the level of sectoral specialisation achieved and the associated positive productivity impacts through localisation effects. To investigate these impacts, a stylised stock and flow model of two cities has been developed. The model has two business service sectors and a 20-minute reduction in rail travel times is introduced to understand the dynamics and the extent of barriers to localisation benefits due to labour and capital mobility costs, and to understand the degree to which these can be unlocked through inter-city transport. The results show that mobility costs limit the potential for increased specialisation through investment in inter-city transport and that further specialisation is more likely to arise when the scheme effects differ between sectors and between cities.