Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel
(eBook)

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Book Cover Information

Hoopla Extract Information

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    [year] => 2024
    [artist] => Pamela Mulloy
    [fiction] => 
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/ecw_9781778522550_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 16464592
    [isbn] => 9781778522550
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => Off the Tracks
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    [pages] => 192
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                    [name] => Pamela Mulloy
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            [0] => Essays & Travelogues
            [1] => Food, Lodging & Transportation
            [2] => History
            [3] => Literary
            [4] => Railroads
            [5] => Rail Travel
            [6] => Special Interest
            [7] => Transportation
            [8] => Travel
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    [synopsis] => 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. 				 			Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel is creative nonfiction that combines the social history of trains and personal travel memoir with a broader meditation on the meaning, importance, and symbolism of traveling.		 			
	Pamela Mulloy is the author of two novels, including As Little As Nothing (2022). She is the editor of the New Quarterly and director of the Wild Writers Literary Festival. She has lived in the UK, Poland, and the US. She now lives in Kitchener, Ontario.				 			
	For the past twelve years, on a day late in June I have boarded a train in Kitchener, Ontario, with my daughter, Esme, the first time when she was just five years old. Two further trains and twenty-seven hours later we disembark in Moncton. In those first moments as we roll out of town, we point out rat boxes behind the bread factory, fishermen on the shores of the Grand River, and, gaining speed, we poise ourselves at the window to catch a glimpse of what we've dubbed "the castle house," a garish paradox amid this pastoral farmland, with its battlement roof and gated boundary. Who are they trying to keep out, I wonder. From our window, we have the perfect, albeit fleeting, view of the castle house and it feels like our secret discovery, an intrusion on those owners who want to be seen and not seen.		
	This seeing and not seeing is what we do during this entire journey: a rusted car, a stack of firewood, an empty swimming pool. Our eyes drift to the outer landscape, to the panoramic view, then flicker back to what is immediately before us, rushing by. 		
	This back and forth, this shifting perspective is something we take for granted, so accustomed we are to this mode of travel we now consider "slow." We are given a view, framed by the window, and have time to take it in, our eyes scanning lazily as though hypnotizing ourselves into a meditative state.		
	If we were a mother and daughter travelling in the nineteenth century, before trains came into popular use, we might travel by stagecoach and in so doing have an even more intimate connection to the flowers and trees outside our window. We would feel the breeze, perhaps tug at a shawl against the chill, hear voices of travellers on the road, or of farmers in passing fields. This is a connection we rarely have now with our environment as we travel. Our aim is to move swiftly, to get to our destination as quickly as possible. Who has time to determine what sort of hawk that is flying overhead?		
	If we were travelling when trains came into use, we might have been agitated by the speed of this new technology, which had so many images storming past our window. We would not be able to smell the lilacs, acknowledge the faces of those standing
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    [subtitle] => A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel
    [publisher] => ECW Press
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