Journey towards a vanishing point

Press, 28 February 1981, Page 17

Journey towards a vanishing point

A Book of Railway Journeys. Compiled by Ludovic Kennedy. Collins, 1980. 356 pp. $24.95. (Reviewed by Stan Darling) Probably everyone who has ever seen a train, much less ridden on one. has at least one railway story to tell. A train is locked into parallel lines, but there are so many of those lines round the world that each jotfmey seems to have no end; there is always another set of tracks receding towards the vanishing point. •’Trains are on the way back.’’ Kennedy says, “if not in substance, at least in the imagination. ’ Kennedy’ has recently completed a 8.8. C. se'ries of television documentaries on great railway journeys of the world. He admits that the literature of train travel is huge, and there is no

way he could escape criticism that he had left out someone’s favourite story or poem in a collection. What he has brought together should still please the most unreasonable of critics. There is even W. H. Auden's poem about the Night Mail, written for an awardwinning G.P.O. film documentary. “This is the Night Mail, crossing the Border Bringing the cheque and the postal order.” Stirring stuff. "It was a three or four day journey to Samarkand;” that line opens one of the several excerpts from the excellent railway writing of Peter Fleming, whose train on that Russian trip was without lights the entire way. and there was neither protest nor improvisation from fellow passengers.

Fleming’s accounts reach a peak later on, in his descriptions of a Trans-Siberian Express derailment and the capturing of an ammunition train in Greece during the Second World War. “It would be difficult to imagine a nicer sort of railway accident,” he writes of the Russian jolt. “The weather was ideal. No-one was badly hurt. And the whole thing was done in just the right Drury Lane manner, with lots of twisted steel and splintered woodwork and turf scoured deeply with demoniac force. For once, the Russians had carried something off.” The train capture was not a copybook exercise. The man in charge of driving the locomotive had never done much except smash up engines as he sabotaged them. "The sergeant in the 4th Hussars had taught him how to start a locomotive and how to launch it on a career of selfdestruction, but Normans early training in how to stop an engine had been confined entirely to making it run violently into a lot of other rolling stock.” Fleming writes. The train they chose to capture had 120 tons of ammunition and 150 tons of petrol: “It was not what you might call an ideally balanced cargo from our point of view.” Kennedy includes a chilling story from British East Africa early this century, where a man-eating lion had been lurking with intent near a wayside station, carrying off meals of railway staff members whenever he could. “Lion fighting with station.” was the excited message from one telegrapher as the lion ripped at the station's tin roof. “Send urgent succour.” Unfortunately, the Superintendent of Police who tried to help was himself carried off after a horrifying incident inside his inspection carriage. ' Kennedy's book also includes a good taste of fiction, with passages from writers as different as Jerome K. Jerome, Proust, Dos Passos. Evelyn Waugh. Alan Paton and Emile Zola.