We've done the India Pacific in the other direction - an amazing trip.

You can get anywhere in Europe by rail, and not always much more expensive than budget airlines. For example, I visit Germany about twice a year by train - Cologne in 5 hours for ?70 or so return and so on.

If you want to find out about travel by the train, the best web source is http://www.seat61.com, a brilliant site run by a former railwaymanl which wins awards every year. Not only is it full of good advice about how to travel by train to European destinations, including train times, and some useful little wrinkles about how to book tickets at good prices, it also shows how to make it overland to East Asia and India. The snag is the trip seems to take about two weeks - having said which, it takes me about 4 weeks to recover from a long haul flight!