Off the Tracks
A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory.
Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits.
Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.
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In this pensive outing, Mulloy (As Little As Nothing) reflects on the history and merits of train travel. Writing of artists and wanderlust, Mulloy notes that train journeys allowed Austrian writer Stephan Zweig (1881-1942) the space "to write, to think, to break free from the ties and habits of his life" and discover the world "that lives within." Mulloy herself experiences a paradoxical "stillness" when traveling by train that allows "creative thought to flourish." Elsewhere, she delves into history of the railroad in the United States, contending that trains sometimes served as sites of class conflicts. Following the 1864 invention of the Pullman car, for example, wealthy passengers enjoyed compartments with private sleeping berths and washrooms, where they were tended to by severely underpaid and mistreated Black porters. (In 1924, those men formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, negotiated for "better pay and working conditions," and became "one of the core underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement.") Though Mulloy's wistful prose occasionally slips into sentimentality (she repeatedly muses on how a writer's real journey is internal and ongoing), recollections of her own train trips are often poignant and vivid, as in a discussion of a yearly trek she takes with her daughter that "allow me to see her out of her element." Readers will be persuaded that traveling can be more than a means for getting from point A to point B.
