There are a handful of books I’ve read that truly enchanted me. Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel by Pamela Mulloy is one of them. Even now, weeks after finishing the book, I can recall the momentum: the sway between drugged calm and startled curiosity I experienced while reading Mulloy’s collection of essays.
Written during the pandemic, Mulloy’s stories of adventure and misadventure—of personal and shared histories—encourage us to contemplate slowness as a way to better navigate the “age of anxiety” in which we live; an age where speed and productivity are often prized above, it seems, all else.
Mulloy writes of leisurely and pleasant train rides with her daughter to visit family in the east coast of Canada, where one “can settle into another way of being, where time actually slows, allowing something that is not exactly boredom but a version of it, one that makes us feel calm and free.” For Mulloy, train travel provides a time for connection to self as well as others, but also a chance to look into the past—a past that is not all tranquil or good. Or that far behind us, for that matter.
In her first essay, “The Primacy of Slowness” Mulloy addresses “largely hidden expansion” stories: how building railways across Canada resulted in wide-spread Indigenous displacement and death. How an estimated 17,000 Chinese workers came to Canada to construct railroads where they were exploited; where hundreds perished as a result of abysmal working conditions.
As Mulloy writes, sitting from her home during lockdown, recalling sitting in the trains of her past, she is aware of her privilege and the human cost of what some might call progress, enjoyment of trains and train travel notwithstanding.
During the pandemic, Mulloy had time to contemplate these tensions and questions and she did so with an incisive eye and an irrepressible appetite for curious and compelling stories. Roaming the world in her mind, she offers captivating glimpses into the evolution of train design and travel that offer possible insight into us: where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be going.
In “Escape: The Train Compartment,” Mulloy invites us into the story of Thomas Briggs, a bank clerk who was murdered on a train in Victorian England. Briggs’ was not only the first train murder in Britain but also the last public hanging. His story is significant because his murder led to the development of corridors between train compartments which were previously only accessible from station platforms. This new design “was introduced with sliding doors to separate the passengers from the traffic between cars, and the peace and isolation, not to mention the class distinction, so desired by European travelers.”
In the following essay, “Women in Travel,” Mulloy focuses on the challenges and dangers of train travel for women. From their skirts (which could be up to six feet in diameter) to their fellow passengers (in 1864, eighteen-year-old Mary-Ann Moody climbed out of a moving train rather than stay with the middle-aged man who was harassing her), Mulloy uses historical detail and imagination to immerse her audience breathless and slack-mouthed in another time, another place, another perspective. Of the assault on Mary, she writes:
And here is where I return to the matter of fashion, wondering whether [Mary] would have been wearing a crinoline, which had started to wane in popularity in the 1860s, or the less restrictive slimline dress with a bustle that might have been easier to control as she clutched to the side of the moving train.
Off the Tracks manages to take the scenic route while staying firmly and fittingly on course. Mulloy brings us with her as she remembers travelling throughout Poland and Spain by train; as she is mugged in an underground walkway in Warsaw; as she embarks on a pensive trip to a concentration camp and explores the clever and compelling travel writing of Mary Shelley. She draws us into the opulent quarters of a private train, buried in snow just outside of Urania, Michigan on Christmas morning in 1880, where French actress Sarah Bernhardt is stranded on a leg of a six-month tour. We are invited to imagine a “banked coal fire keeping you warm, a stillness that only a world buffered by snow can create. Now imagine that this is no ordinary train, but one with the kind of luxury usually reserved for royalty. A lounge with sofas and club chairs, an upright piano, potted palms, and bouquets of flowers. The car itself inlaid with wood panelling, brass lamps, velour draperies, stained glass windowpanes, carpets, and zebra rugs. An adjoining dining car holds a table for ten and is served by two cooks. It is a train with two sleeping rooms, and your own has a large brass bed and a carved mahogany vanity.”
The extravagance recounted in this passage is all the more tangible for Mulloy’s detailed and measured description.
Throughout these essays, Mulloy proves herself to be the best of tour guides: her tone is chummy and warm and the information she imparts, a reflection of study and keen observation. Off the Tracks is a meandering and marvellous read that encourages us to wander and wonder while sitting still. In our age of anxiety, it’s a book that asks us to contemplate the all but forgotten and necessary luxury of taking our time.
Off the Tracks: A Meditation on Train Journeys in a Time of No Travel, by Pamela Mulloy. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ECW Press, April 2024. 192 pages. $18.95, paper.
Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets, and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at hollayghadery.com.
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