Five(ish) Stories About Weird Trains – Sarah Brooks Guest Post

Hello and welcome to this extra-special Track of Words guest post; special because I’m delighted to be hosting my very own sister – Sarah Brooks, author of the upcoming novel The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, coming in June 2024 from W&N Books! I am, as you can probably imagine, very excited about this particular book release, and I can’t wait to read it (at the time of writing, I’ve just got my hands on an advance copy), and to see it out in the wild in 2024. In the meantime though, I’m so pleased that Sarah has agreed to contribute this guest post, in which she’s going to talk a bit about the magic of strange train journeys in fiction, something that will be relevant for anyone interested in The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands! So without further ado, over to Sarah.

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Sarah Brooks: I’m delighted to have been asked to contribute to the Track of Words Advent Calendar, not least because it means that Michael (AKA my long-suffering younger brother) has possibly begun to forgive me for a childhood of stealing his toys, not letting him watch his favourite tv programmes, and generally sighing loudly at his presence. (I’m sorry, Michael…!) Anyway, we also spent a lot of time engrossed in books, so that we could ignore each other (and everyone else) entirely, and have continued to do exactly the same thing well into our adult lives. But it’s also books that have brought us together, and it’s been lovely to share recommendations and obsessions, and of course to read Track of Words — and I’m in awe of just how much work goes into this site.

For this post, I want to talk a bit about trains.

There’s something about trains that makes for good stories — that moment of anticipation as a train thunders towards the station; the little community of travellers brought together in a carriage; the sheer power of the thing as it hurtles through the landscape. And who hasn’t succumbed to vengeful fantasies whilst waiting on a packed platform for a delayed Transpennine Express that might or might not eventually turn up?

For the last few years I’ve immersed myself in train stories whilst writing my novel, set on an alternative version of the Trans-Siberian Express, so I wanted to share some of my favourites. Whilst there are loads of brilliant novels set on trains, I’ve stuck to short fiction here. There are so many to choose from, but here are five(ish), in no particular order, that I particularly like:

Night Train to the Stars by Kenji Miyazawa, 1934, translated by John Bester

This story takes place against the backdrop of the Milky Way Festival, where, according to legend, two celestial lovers are reunited once a year when a flock of magpies make a bridge over the River of the Heavens. On the night of the festival, two estranged friends — Giovanni and Campanella — find themselves on a train travelling through the stars, making stops at various celestial markers including the Northern and Southern Cross. I love this story for its descriptions of the landscape outside the train: “Giovanni looked and saw that the edge of the bluish white, gleaming Milky Way was completely covered with sky-pampas grass that rustled as it swayed and rippled.” And the train itself, with its blue velvet seats and brass buttons, and the abrupt appearances and departures of its odd passengers, feels eerily familiar to any Studio Ghibli fan.

Katabasis: Seraphic Trains by Sarah Monette, 2006

What if certain trains on the metro system aren’t ordinary trains at all, but ‘seraphic trains’, carrying winged men and beast-headed children? These are the trains that run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie; “They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend.”

Train travel has provided rich inspiration for tales of journeys into the underworld, and Sarah Monette plays with the Orpheus and Eurydice story. There’s a vivid scene on one of the seraphic trains where a young girl — clutching her guitar, and feeling awkward in her black clothes and dyed hair — watches a horde of children with cat-heads and a group of tree-root creatures, and talks to the dead. The trains here are oddly alive, seeming to reflect secret fears and desires back to those who are lucky or unlucky enough to see them.

And I also wanted to mention N.K. Jemisin’s The You Train here, which is another imagining of how the metro might call out to someone who is lonely and lost and waiting on the platform; “In fact, I think they’re all checking me out. All the defunct lines, the dead lines. I think they never really go away.”

A Subway Named Mobius by A.J. Deutsch, 1950

This is something of an SF classic, but I only discovered it when reading The Platform Edge: Uncanny Tales of the Railways, one of the British Library’s brilliant ‘Tales of the Weird’ series. In it, the Boston subway has become so complex that it creates a kind of Möbius strip, causing a train to vanish into another dimension. We don’t get much of the actual experience of being on a train here, but the depiction of city bureaucracy and increasingly frantic theorising about the topological complexity of the System are hugely enjoyable. It also makes a nice pairing with Hao Jingfang’s ‘New Year Train’ (translated by Ken Liu), another story about a vanished train, though luckily for the passengers in this one, the designers of the train are making slightly more careful use of the possibilities of the space-time continuum.

The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabinski, 1919, translated by Miroslaw Lipinski

A man keeps waking up miles from home, driven by a strange compulsion to take a train to an unknown destination. All he knows is that he’s repelled by the symbols of the railway itself; the posters and advertisements and uniforms, personifying the imperfections of a system that will remain forever earthbound, however much the railway companies boast of their speed and power. And in an encounter with a demonic conductor he argues the failings of the train — “Even if you could invent a devilish train that would circumvent the entire globe in one hour, eventually you’d return to the same point you started from: you are chained to the ground.”

This is the title story in a short collection of Grabiński’s work, and the whole book is fascinating, as is translator and editor Miroslaw Lipinski’s introduction to ‘the Polish Poe’ and his stories of solitary men compelled to travel yet appearing to know that their journeys will end in physical or psychological destruction. (Though be warned, if you read too many of these stories you’ll be struck by the urge to finish every paragraph with an ellipsis…)

Express to Beijing West Railway Station by Congyun ‘Mu Ming’ Gu, 2020, translated by Kiera Johnson

Finally, in a somewhat self-serving move, I’ve chosen a story published in Samovar, the quarterly special issue of Strange Horizons devoted to speculative fiction in translation, which I co-edit, but I couldn’t have a list of train stories without including this one, which was shortlisted in the Ignyte Awards in 2021. Here, Beijing West Railway Station stands as a connecting point through different tracks in time, with diaries or photographs as the only tickets accepted, and a charmingly reassuring ticket-office attendant, who explains quantum mechanics with the help of her knitting; “History is nothing more than a complex construction of records and observations. How worlds are split apart, how they’re merged together, how they overlap – you have to knit a lot before you can understand.” The story plays with our nostalgia about train travel whilst also asking questions about where it might be going — the tracks connecting our futures and our pasts.

Certain themes emerge again and again in these stories, including the weird tension between the promise of the train and where it might take you, and the terror that it might be somewhere you can’t return from. The railway tracks might seem to stand for the freedom of travel; of mastery over the earth, but the stories delight in journeys that spin out of control, as passengers are carried helplessly into strange dimensions. I wanted to explore these contradictions in my novel The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands. In this version of the nineteenth century, strange changes have made the land between the Russian and Chinese empires passable only by means of the great Trans-Siberian Express. But although the powerful Trans-Siberia Company boasts of the strength of the train, there are growing threats from a landscape that can unsettle the mind, and the author of an infamous travel guide warns that there is a price to pay that is far beyond the cost of a ticket. The novel was inspired by a memorable journey on the real Trans-Siberian Express, but it’s been fed as well by countless other trips, both real and fictional.

So if you’re not put off by warnings that the Trans-Siberia Company bears absolutely no responsibility for your eventual safe arrival, then the book is out in June! And I wish everyone very safe journeys for 2024.

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Sarah Brooks is a writer and academic living in Leeds. She researches classical Chinese ghost stories and helps run the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. She attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in 2012, and is a loyal member of the Leeds Writers’ Circle. Her novel The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is out in June 2024 from Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK and Flatiron Books in the US. You can find her on Twitter @Sarah_L_Brooks and Instagram @sarah_l_brooks.

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Huge thanks to Sarah for taking the time to write this great guest post – I don’t know about you, but now I definitely want to go out and find those stories, and experience those train journeys for myself! If you like your weird train journeys and you’re looking for more, definitely check out The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, which is available to pre-order now ahead of its release in June 2024!

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands is due out on the 20th June from W&N Books (or the 18th June in the US, via Flatiron Books) – check out the links below to pre-order* your copy:

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