Thirty minutes from London on the Chiltern Lines Railway, and you’re on the boundaries of Metroland, inspiration of those brilliant posters of the 1920s and 1930s, now thankfully preserved for all to see in the London Transport Museum.

Anyone involved in projects spanning the 1920s to 1950s would find an outing in the area highly stimulating. The countryside, so rolling, rivery and quickly reached is little changed from that which seduced hikers out of the city 50 years ago. Practising map-reading as you go, you can follow a network of foot and bridle-paths to the peak of Coombe Hill, highest point of the Chilterns, survey the vales of Aylesbury and Amersham and view the magnificent woodlands around Chequers, home of British prime ministers since 1917.

One branch of this hourly rail-service takes you via Betjeman’s Harrow on the Hill to Aylesbury, where you could be met by a vintage charabanc from Classic Coaches and carried the seven miles to the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre at Quainton, terminus of Metroland and the old Metropolitan Line. The operator of Classic Coaches, an accountant by profession, owns coaches dating from between 1947 and 1966, all of which he is restoring to full working order. You can journey sedately along country roads in a green and cream 1957 AEC Reliance: historically correct in every facet, wooden window-pillars, moquette seats, marquetry ceiling and that unique aroma reminiscent of days out in a “charry” before the motorways got going.

The Railway Centre provides material for any railway period you like to choose. Feel as small as a flea alongside a giant Victorian steam loco, glimpse how a King dined in style on a Royal Train of the 1920s; examine one of three original Thomas the Tank Engines, refurbished at a cost of Pounds 150,000; enjoy your tea in a carriage imported from the New York subway. Three red carriages of an apparently ordinary underground train sit in a siding. They are, in fact, the remains of one bombed in the Second World War. The bits, assembled and reconstructed, are a horrific reminder of the London Blitz.

The Centre, open for summer-term school groups, offers guided tours, a ride on a British mainline steam railway (waved off by a guard with a green flag, a flat hat and a ginger moustache) and project notes that bring history to life.

The other branch of the Chiltern Line drops you at pretty Beaconsfield and so to Bekonscot, oldest model village in the world and a thought-provoking time-shift to the 1930s. Black-hatted rurals admire the cricketing gentry on the green, Scouts in kneelength knickerbockers set up camp, hedged discreetly from the Guides in blue starched dresses, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is advertised at the local cinema and a man on a blue-and-white tricycle invites you to stop him and buy ice-cream. Bekonscot is a railway buff’s paradise, with its 438 yards of electrically operated steam track. The trains, scale-perfect, are operated on an L-style Westinghouse lever frame, installed on the Southern Railway in 1929. Worked by a real signalman they chunter below the landscaped gardens of neat Metroland homes, over bridges and lakes, while the workers go off to the coal-mine in an open-topped bus.

The Grand Union Canal offered a direct waterway between London and Birmingham at the beginning of last century. However, in the 1920s there was a big government-funded project to widen the locks to take more freight, so most canal locks date from then. In Metroland’s Hillingdon area, the Victorian brickfields were filled in with rubbish toted from London on waterways. Right till the 1950s canal boats took hay for horses to the capital and carried manure out again to Hillingdon. Some industrial firms, such as Ovaltine and Sainsbury, were using the waterways until the 1980s.

At Pitstone Wharf, eight miles from Aylesbury, two narrow-boats are available for school parties. Groups will encounter all aspects of canal engineering, evoking the busyness that gave life to the canals in their heyday 50 years ago: roving bridges, toll and pumping houses, and locks which the children can help operate.

Today life on the Grand Union Canal is leisurely. From Pitstone it follows the contours of the landscape, climbing into the Chilterns. Sailing along the backs of things - mills, barns, warehouses, gardens - you can watch herons delicately picking their way along the towpath, perhaps spot a mole or a water rat picknicking among the hedgerows. You could almost imagine you were in Wind-in-the-Willows country.

o London Transport Museum, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7BB. Tel: 071 379 6344 o Classic Coaches are available for private hire. Tel: 0494 521994 o Buckinghamshire Railway Centre, Quainton Road Station, nr Aylesbury HP22 4BY. Tel: 0296 655720 o Bekonscot Model Village, Warwick Road, Beaconsfield, Bucks. Tel: 0494 672919 o Grebe Canal Cruises, Pitstone Wharf, Pitstone, Near Leighton Buzzard, Beds LU7 9AD. Tel: 0296 661920 (day)