Stop the Train

"Stop the Train was the result of watching TV! Shocking, really, that I should sit there thinking, “I could turn this documentary into a novel.” But I did. I thought, “Oh if only I’d pressed record.” This is a long time ago. There wasn’t any i-Player back then. I took myself off to the BBC where for a tenner you could watch any programme again in the basement. I watched this documentary, made notes and turned it into a fiction. The town in the documentary was Enid in Oklahoma and dates back to the 1889 Land Run (when everybody could race into Oklahoma and grab a piece of land). The people who raced there by train would get out at a putative station, which didn’t exist and wasn’t anything but a patch of prairie, and build a town round it, with the expectation that the town would grow and ranchers would bring their cattle in and put them on the train. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. So, when the rail owners decided that they weren’t going to stop at Enid the people of Enid went barmy and did everything they possibly could to persuade them otherwise. They shot at the trains and ripped the rails up. I thought, “Yay! I can definitely do something with this!” They were amazing people. They got off the train with their only worldly goods, dug themselves a hole in the ground and put a tarpaulin over it and lived like prairie dogs. The first winter it was so cold that the milk froze in their goats and the women’s dresses froze to their legs. Isolation’s good, though, isn’t it, in a fiction? Because it isolates readers as well and they feel the need to get out at all costs. Panic keeps them reading! But yes, the town really had to stop that train. I think some of my favourite characters are in there, especially the schoolteacher. I got so fond of them that I wanted to bring them back. It’s the first time I’ve ever been tempted to write a sequel. This time it was paddle steamers rather than trains. Sometimes characters just materialise. It’s one of the magics of writing: you can invent two people, put them in a dark place and wait for them to speak. And they come out with something you’re not expecting them to say! I’d watched the documentary so I had quite a lot of the information. I read up on the land runs, obviously. Eventually, a year or so later I actually visited Enid, which is now a place that’s got a railway museum, for obvious reasons. I was really glad that I hadn’t gone there while I was writing the book, though, because the prairie, which I’d imagined as this huge, menacing open space, just looked like the English countryside. It was so mild and gentle with soft rolling grassy fields …and five lane highways. Fiction is a more pleasant place to be sometimes, but not because it’s invented. A basis in truth certainly makes for more original content. Such extraordinary things have happened to people. Such extraordinary people exist."