Great American Railroad Stations

Half a century ago, your correspondent, as a new entrant to Maidstone Grammar School (one of whose most infamous alumni was a certain Dr Beeching), well remembers listening with some incredulity to the headmaster, a tall, imposing, austere academic, expounding on the intricacies of the wheel settings of Southern Railway steam engines. It must have been shortly after this bizarre episode that he first read Agatha Christie’s famous whodunnit, Murder on the Orient Express, in which it transpires that they all dunnit. Three years ago, on a sparkling spring Sunday morning, he boarded the Pullman Parlor‐Observer Car, Gertrude Emma,...