The Train Between Worlds timeline, 1856 to 2028

Before the books

Dates from marks cut into the stone of the eleven feet, from Verity Sloane's observation books, and from what characters remember of the world outside.

1840s

The cutting that will later be found inside the train is built: coursed rubble, dressed quoins, a piece of the permanent way. Sloane's estimate, on stylistic grounds, not independently verified.

1856

The oldest legible date cut into the stone. Somebody with a chain and a level was already standing there, doing what Sloane would do.

1888, 1911, 1974

More marks, in conventions nobody aboard can read.

1968

A woman in a scullery in the West Riding paints QUIST on the bottom of a galvanised bucket. If it goes out of this house it's got the name on it. She knows one verse of a song and makes up the rest, differently each time.

1979

A crow's foot benchmark is cut into the stone of the eleven feet, bar over-long to the right, a burr where the tool jumped. Two years later the same hand cuts the same mark into a retaining wall in a Shropshire cutting, where the Ordnance Survey will find it.

Verity Sloane's survey

4 August 1981

Verity Sloane boards. Thirty-six, fourteen years on the Survey, nobody in the world she would go back for. Half past eleven at night, a torch and a theodolite, a train standing lit in a cutting. She establishes control point 1 eleven days later and writes: A thing that cannot be interrogated can still be measured. I intend to measure it.

Spring 1983

After two years unable to open a door, she offers a man called Ferriday, six years into searching for his wife, some help. He opens forty doors for her over five months. First annotation: H. Ferriday, 40, taken 3.iv.83.

2 August 1988

A dark-haired young woman who refuses her name, sixty; her companion, forty. Neither retains the encounter. The companion described a village, a green door and his mother's face at some length. I regret the necessity. The woman is Lumi, nineteen, eleven months aboard.

c. 1994

Lumi and Elio get off, at a platform in a town with no tracks behind it, with no money and no papers. A man in Leeds who does not ask. Four months' work in a laundry. Thirty-one years begin.

1994 / 1997

Fergus Nolan boards. Taken 12 March 1997, seventy-four, seeking a wife whose name he repeats a great deal. It is not material.

1999

E. Devane, two, negligible, subject already spent. Eilish has been aboard some years by then, looking for a man she can no longer describe.

4 January 2005

D. Brack, thirty-one.

The Quists

2006

Marion Quist, sixty-one, waves her sons off at a bus stop in the rain, and goes. Her sons sit on a bench at Sandal and Agbrigg for twenty minutes; on the 16:22 Peter says I'll find her, and Abel says she'll turn up. Marion boards the train, carrying a bucket.

3 March – 29 June 2007

Sloane approaches an elderly woman in the eleventh who declines to relinquish her bucket and does not appear to have a name. She is seeking one of mine and shall know when I see. Two hundred and six doors in four months. On 4 June she sits down beside Sloane in the dark and puts a hand on her arm. On the last day, at the door of the eleventh: you've been very good to me, love. The passengers there call her Ivy.

c. 2008

Peter Quist boards, looking for his mother. She is four carriages away.

8 September 2010 – 11 February 2011

Sloane approaches a joiner in the buffet car who describes his mother at length and with evident pleasure. He accepts within four minutes, the fastest recorded. Five months in the black, four hundred doors. He sings; he calls it our job. On the last morning he says he has found her, that she was in the eleventh all along, and that he intends to tell his brother. Query: significance. I incline to the view that it is confusion merely. 400. Exceptional.

2011

Abel Quist boards, looking for Peter. Finds his name on the wall in his second month and is sick with relief. Settles into fifteen years of tea at twenty past ten, four hours a day, and a map.

2013 – 2014

Abel walks past a red door because he is frightened, and will remember the feeling. Writes variable, Tuesdays beside the corridor in the thirty-first and is pleased with himself for a decade.

The Veys and the Marshes

January 2015

Rosalind Vey boards. Marta Vey follows about two years later, sits with her sister, finds her name thin as breath, and makes a decision she keeps for nine years.

2019

June Marsh, seventeen, walks out of the house on Bellweather Road after an argument about a phone bill, gets the bus into town, and stands on a platform. A train comes in that is not on the board. I'd like her to not know where I am for a day.

2019 – 2025

June works out that a name can be inked back in, tells about forty people, and spends four thousand one hundred and ten memories of her mother on strangers. Six thousand and change get off. Marta Vey is never told. Danny Brack stands up one morning, about 2021, and walks off. Sloane keeps the writing carriage in pens for six years and never looks in the box.

March 2025

Elio dies. Lumi sits in a kitchen for a fortnight, then goes and stands on a platform. The 11:47 comes, because it always comes for anyone who wants it.

Late 2025

The Memory Fare. Six years, one month and nine days after June left, Cora Marsh finds a grey bag tagged J. MARSH, NOT LOST, logged off a service that does not exist. She boards at 11:47 on a Thursday. Fifty-one doors of June; then two hundred-odd of everything else; then the wall.

The Forty-Year Passenger

The minute after

Abel Quist stands in the vestibule with the map gone and a spare cardigan in his bag, and goes to find out what happens to a departed name. Finds clean plaster and a benchmark cut into it.

Weeks later

A hundred and forty-one benchmarks. The chart room. Observation book twenty-nine. Sloane comes in carrying pens and puts her proposal. The eleventh carriage, walked eleven thousand and one times; a woman with a bucket; QUIST on the base.

Eleven doors

The eleven feet: coursed rubble, silence, two hundred and twelve marks, a crow's foot from 1979. Sloane discovers her own name has been black since 1981.

Three attempts

Marion Quist's name is inked back, on the second and third of three tries, with the only two memories Verity Sloane ever had of another person.

3 March 2026

Verity Sloane dies on the floor of her chart room, fingers on observation book nineteen, listening to a description of a wall. 411 taken. 1 returned. Abel cuts his first and last benchmark in the upright beside the door, dated 2026.

March 2026

Abel, Marion, Marta and Rosalind step down onto the platform at Sandal and Agbrigg in the rain. Lumi stays. Hollis has the nineteenth at twenty past ten, three cups.

14 March 2028

In a rented house in Agbrigg, Abel finishes the record, ninety thousand words, and writes the rest under Sloane's two numbers in his own hand. Outside, his mother is doing the step, singing the second verse.