Text 1: Berth twelve, by Nia Rowlands

An original contemporary magazine article.

I had imagined polished wood, silver teapots and the gentle rhythm of wheels carrying me into sleep. Instead, at ten forty-five, I found a bright platform smelling of wet concrete and a train with rain sliding down its windows.

My cabin was berth twelve. Calling it a cabin was generous. It was a wardrobe that had been persuaded to lie down, containing a narrow bed, a folding basin and exactly enough floor for one of my feet at a time. When the train pulled away, my bottle rolled under the bed with the confidence of something that knew I could not reach it.

The attendant checked my ticket and asked what time I wanted to be woken. He spoke quietly, as if the whole train were already asleep. At midnight I went to the lounge, where six strangers had formed the temporary community of long-distance travellers. We shared a charger, a packet of biscuits and our reasons for going north. A student was returning to university; a nurse was visiting her sister; an elderly man said only that he never flew if there was a train.

Back in berth twelve, sleep arrived in pieces. Every bend pressed me towards the wall, and every station poured white light around the blind. At two in the morning, the train stopped with a sigh. At three, it began again with a jolt that sent my shoes marching across the floor. The promised gentle rhythm was, in fact, a series of negotiations with gravity.

Yet at twenty to six, when the attendant tapped on my door with tea, I lifted the blind and forgave everything. The rain had gone. Beyond the glass, dark hills stood above a silver river, and small houses showed one yellow window at a time. For several minutes the train seemed to be the only moving thing in the world.

We reached the city before breakfast. I stepped onto the platform tired, creased and carrying one dusty bottle recovered from beneath the bed. I had not travelled in luxury and I had hardly slept. Even so, as I watched the train continue through the waking country, it seemed extraordinary that it had stitched two distant cities together while we slept.

Text 2: Three hours!, by Thomas Ellery

An original diary entry written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This diary entry was written in 1846, when railway travel was still a new experience for many passengers.

This morning I travelled upon the railway for the first time. Mother had begged me to take the coach, saying that no man could be carried at such speed without injury, but curiosity defeated caution.

The engine waited beneath a roof of smoke. It breathed, hissed and shook, some black animal chained to the earth. I confess that when a porter shut the carriage door, my courage deserted me. Opposite sat a farmer with a basket upon his knees, and beside him a clerk who pretended to read but watched the engine through the window.

A whistle shrieked. There came a blow from behind, the farmer seized his basket, and we were moving.

Such speed! The hedges became green walls and the sheep vanished like sparks. I gripped the edge of my seat, certain that the wheels must leave the rails at the next curve. Smoke and cinders flew past the glass. Conversation was impossible, for the carriage rattled like a box of nails thrown down a staircase.

Presently we entered a tunnel. Daylight was extinguished and the smoke found its way inside. Someone cried out. The farmer announced that we had been posted through the earth like a letter, which made us laugh more loudly than the joke deserved. When we burst again into daylight, every face in the carriage looked newly washed with relief.

Fear did not leave me at once, but wonder gradually took its place. Villages that had always seemed a great distance apart now followed one another as quickly as houses in a street. Before I had grown accustomed to the motion, the clerk folded his paper and told me we had arrived.

The coach requires a whole day for that journey. The railway had carried us there in three hours. I walked from the station with soot upon my coat and my legs still trembling, but also with the conviction that distance itself had been defeated. When anyone next tells me that the railway is an unnecessary terror, I shall answer with two words: three hours!