Reflections in moving windows

In April 2006, a naïve architecture student from Britain set out from Montréal on a month-long journey across North America, entirely by train.
James Benedict Brown traced a clockwise arc to the Pacific coast and back again: Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr, up the Pacific coast on the Coast Staright and Cascades, across the Rockies and the prairies on the Canadian, to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay, and finally east to Halifax and the Atlantic.
Seen from Moving Windows is a memoir of slow travel through vast landscapes—the kind of journey that takes time to see properly. Along the way, Brown encounters fellow travellers, small-town America, and the unexpected beauty of industrial decline. He rides vintage streamliners and workhorse locals, eats pancakes in swaying dining cars, and sleeps upright in coach class through long prairie nights.
Written with warmth and self-deprecating humour, this is also a book about solitude, about being young and uncertain, and about a continent seen at the speed of steel wheels on iron rails. Twenty years later, looking back on those thirty days, Brown weaves in the stories he couldn't tell at the time: the colonial histories written into the landscape, the residential schools whose legacy was being acknowledged that very spring, and what it meant to cross Indigenous territories on trains built for settlement and extraction.
A love letter to the train, to North America, and to the view from moving windows.