Train travel has a terrific cheerleader in Canadian author Pamela Mulloy. In Off the Tracks, a dazzling new work of nonfiction, she weaves together stories she gathered from various eras and corners of the globe to celebrate this incomparable means of crossing landscapes. 

The experience is almost ritualistic for Mulloy. “For the past twelve years, on a day in late June I have boarded a train in Kitchener, ON, with my daughter Esme. Two further trains and twenty-seven hours later we disembark in Moncton,” she writes of the annual return to her Maritime birthplace, one of her favourite and most enduring journeys.

Off the Tracks, which comes out April 30, follows two novels: 2022’s As Little As Nothing and 2018’s The Deserters. Mulloy has much to draw on for all three, having worked in Poland as an English teacher and in public relations before moving to England to complete an MA in fiction studies, where she met and married her husband. They moved to Illinois for his postdoctoral job, had Esme and settled in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont., where she is the editor The New Quarterly literary journal and creative director of the Wild Writers Literary Festival. 

 

 

“My writing has often occurred around the edges – of jobs, of moves, of helping to raise our daughter,” she explains on her website.

The new book coalesced during the pandemic, ergo its subtitle, A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel. “I had been thinking about writing about trains for two decades,” she says in a phone interview from her home in Kitchener, Ont. “It started as fiction and didn’t work out, so I parked it.” 

At that point, we had all taken train travel for granted. “In a time when I couldn’t go anywhere, I thought most deeply about travel, so the switch from fiction to nonfiction was organic.” 

Mulloy has journeyed by train throughout her life – sometimes alone, sometimes with Esme –  with her imagination ignited by the smudgy blur outside the window, and seldom with regard to a speedy arrival. One European journey was especially notable. 

“I began to stitch together the various legs to Poland to see if it were even feasible by train, and then piece by piece I started booking them,” she writes. “I stretched our trip even further by planning a day in Paris, followed by the overnight train to Berlin. Our trip had nothing to do with shrinking time and space, in fact we expanded it nearly twenty-fold.”

While Mulloy admits the book “is not a comprehensive social history of trains” – Asia is not covered, for example, because Mulloy hasn’t experienced it – Off the Tracks is dense with fascinating ephemera and every bit as transporting. 

“In North America the carriages were designed with an open interior, benches on both sides and a coal stove in the middle,” she writes of 19th century travel. “Charles Dickens describes them as being like ‘shabby omnibuses, but larger’ and was struck by the freedom of speech that prevailed where the conversation could range from politics to banking to the price of cotton.”

In Mulloy’s telling, train travel is so much more than simply moving goods and people from point A to point B. It has changed the course of history, giving rise to Greenwich Mean Time, for example, by forcing “towns and villages in England and elsewhere to abandon ‘local time’ and adopt a uniform time so that train schedules lined up.” 

It helped to unionize low-wage, hard-working Black workers — via the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925 — and even influenced what type of plants grow near tracks by dispersing seeds, according to a recent study undertaken by France’s National Museum of Natural History.

Oddball trivia like that makes Off the Tracks enormously readable. Yet Mulloy admits creating non-fiction required more rigorous research. “With fiction, you can roam where your imagination goes, but with non-fiction, I had to make sure I got my source material correct.” 

That led her to dive deep into the travel writing genre. Her selected bibliography spans centuries, with books from writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in 1796 to Jan Morris in 2001, though as Mulloy notes, “the travel writing industry has been dominated by men.”

In the book, there are vivid accounts of train adventures by famous early adopters like Dickens and French actress Sarah Bernhardt. French novelist Alphonse Daudet was scandalized by third-class coaches, where he observed, rather haughtily, “drunken sailors singing, big fat peasants with their mouths open like those of dead fish, children, fleas, and wet nurses.” 

Mulloy also chronicles people with more mundane reasons for overland trips, like the unnamed anthropologist she meets on a train in eastern Canada.  “She tells us that she makes this journey twice a year, from Vancouver to Halifax. She is terrified of flying [and] once made a trip from Washington State to China by land and sea — two ships and several trains.”

Off the Tracks’ true-life tales are propelled by Mulloy’s evocative prose, as lively and reflective as the experiences she describes. “I have travelled enough to know the danger of expectations,” she writes. “ … It can affect the way you view the Eiffel Tower when you’ve seen it for the third or fourth time and your anticipation has been blunted by familiarity, but this time with your daughter, you see it anew.”

Today, train travel is a meditative way to move, but Mulloy reminds us that, in post-stagecoach days, locomotives were “like jet engines. People were terrified. Women thought their uteruses might fly out of their body because it was going so fast,” she says, laughing. “If you went to London from Manchester by stagecoach it would take four days. By train, it took four to five hours. That was huge.” 

She continues: “I think we’re so used to travel as a frazzled experience where we are rushing to arrive… then we arrive. Train travel allows us to slow down a bit, to focus on the here and now of that travel experience.” 

These days, the appeal of trains is buoyed by climate concerns. “Diesel trains emit about half what flights do, and electric trains emit 90 per cent less,” Mulloy notes. “Plus, there’s a romantic notion about trains, which is an easy sell.

When she gets on a train, she’s often focused on her books and writing, but also loves the rocking motion. “We don’t get cradled much as adults,” she laughs. “It’s very soothing.”