I've always wanted to put a railway in one of my crime novels. My grandfather was a train driver, working on the famous Great Western Railway, and the Peak District where I live is full of relics from the age of steam. From decaying signal boxes to the impressive Headstone viaduct, these landmarks are a reminder of how ubiquitous train travel once was. I utilised one Victorian tunnel as the location of the crime in my latest novel, The Shrouded Path.
Rail journeys have an enduring appeal in fiction. Children's classics may romanticise the practicalities of train travel, but have nurtured a love of railways in generations of readers. Distance or comfort isn't necessarily important: you can get as much enjoyment from reading of a short trip through the English suburbs as a journey across Europe on the Orient Express. And rail journeys can also shape a narrative, with the compartmentalised world of a train carriage providing the perfect opportunity for a locked-room style mystery.
How to narrow a list down to10 fictional rail journeys? My choices below reflect the novels where I'd not only immersed myself in the story but also travelled in my mind alongside the characters.
1. The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by George Simenon, translated by Sian Reynolds
Many of us have watched a train pass and felt the urge to join its passengers on a trip into the unknown. Alongside his Maigret crime novels, Simenon wrote a number of psychological studies, his romans durs. In this dark and disturbing book, Dutch office worker Kees Popinga steps on to a Paris-bound train having committed one murder, ready to embark on a spree of violence.
2. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Dickens largely ignores the railways in his books until Dombey and Son, a strange omission given that the author himself was a victim of the Staplehurst train accident of 1865. Dickens is clearly appalled by the destruction caused by the advent of rail travel. A bereaved Dombey, mourning the loss of his son, draws parallels between swiftness of Paul's death and the speed of the train hurtling through the countryside, monstrously sweeping away everything in its path.
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