Mr. Complain always has something to grumble about, even as he takes a spectacular train ride through mountains, volcanoes, caves, and oceans, but as his trip comes to an end he realizes he genuinely enjoyed the journey and is ready to go again.

"Ellen was just trying to help a stranger. That was how it started: giving a few minutes respite to a flustered young mother sitting opposite her on the train. A few minutes holding her baby while the mother makes an urgent call. The weight of the child in her arms making Ellen's heart ache for what she can never have. Five minutes pass. Ten.The train pulls into a station and Ellen is stunned to see the mother hurrying away down the platform, without...

The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of...

"After two and a half years as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, David Greene travels across the country--a 6,000-mile journey by rail, from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok--to speak with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years. Reaching beyond the headline-grabbing protests in Moscow, Greene speaks with a group of singing babushkas from Buranovo, a teenager hawking 'space rocks' from last spring's meteor shower...

Combines an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's experiences as he traveled from New York to California by train in 1879 and a description of the building and operation of railroads in nineteenth-century America.

"A girl named Ruth Ellen tells the story of her family's train journey from North Carolina to New York City as part of the Great Migration"--Provided by publisher.

While on a night train, three strangers discover a corpse and a box of diamonds. At first, the three scheme to ditch the body and split the fortune, until their greed and paranoia pits them against each other.

"In April 1945, the funeral train carrying the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt embarked on a three-day, thousand-mile odyssey through nine states before reaching the president's home where he was buried. It passed with darkened windows; few gave thought to what might be happening aboard. A closer look inside the train, however, would reveal a Soviet spy about to leak a state secret, a newly widowed Eleanor Roosevelt, who just found out that her husband's...

Experience twelve of the greatest train journeys of the world.