A sample, free to read
The opening of the first chapter.
Kinnaber is one week in August 1895, told three times over three parcels. Part One is told by a newspaper man on the West Coast train, sent to time everything and wire from Aberdeen. This is how it begins.
Kinnaber · Part One of Three
The Correspondent
Euston to Aberdeen by the West Coast Route. The night of Thursday, 22nd August 1895.
The editor's instruction ran to fourteen words, which for him was a speech. "Go up on the eight o'clock from Euston tonight. Time everything. Wire from Aberdeen."
I had timed trains before, as a hobby rather than a trade, and I knew what was wanted. A good watch, a notebook with the mileposts written in beforehand, a window seat on the near side, and the sense to keep quiet about it. Railway servants do not like a passenger with a watch. They think, rightly, that he is looking for something to complain of.
Euston at half past seven was not the Euston I knew.
The Tourist Express was not in the timetable at all as a thing you could book a seat on and be sure of; it was in the newspapers, which had been printing the arrival times at Aberdeen every morning for a fortnight as if they were the cricket. Seven-twenty. Seven. Five-thirty on the Sunday. Then this very morning the East
The chapter continues
Another 1550 words or so in the parcel: three carriages and a crowd that is not travelling, a hundred and twelve entries in the notebook by Crewe, an engine called Hardwicke that nobody looked at, a guard who asks him to put the lamp out, and a porter at Perth with the best joke he has heard all summer. With the story come the ticket, the route chart, a page from the timing log and the post card.
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The correspondent is ours, and so is everything he says. The race, the eight o’clock departure, the three carriages, Hardwicke over Shap and the 8 hours 32 minutes to Aberdeen are not, and the sources are listed with every parcel.