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Runaway Train: Sometimes It's About Escape
15,000 miles. 60 days. 30 trains. 20 countries. And one unbroken escapade of escape.
Runaway Train is two journeys sharing the same compartment—one, a meticulously planned expedition tracing the longest stretch of railroad track on earth in search of kinetic meaning; the other, an uninvited the ghost of a recently failed marriage and a career that had just unraveled.
More than a travel narrative, this memoir is a candid, often darkly funny exploration of flight, fright, and freeze—and what happens when the thing you’re running from turns out to be the person sitting next to you—or the one waiting at the end of the tracks.
If Jenny Diski had taken the train instead of a ship, if Paul Theroux had shared his compartment with some of Hunter S. Thompson’s sketchier friends—and if the Mos Eisley cantina had been a rolling bazaar—you’d have something like Runaway Train.
Each train was a blind date—with brutish bounty hunters, comely opera singers, human traffickers, grifters posing as police (their molls batting eyelashes on the platform), wide-eyed prisoners chained to my top bunk, and surreptitious lovers casting moving shadows, their sounds masked by the primal rumble of the beast train in the middle of the night. You never knew what you were going to get; between the danger and the odd characters were quiet stretches of solitude and unexpected moments of connection.
Runaway Train is two journeys sharing the same compartment—one, a meticulously planned expedition tracing the longest stretch of railroad track on earth in search of kinetic meaning; the other, an uninvited the ghost of a recently failed marriage and a career that had just unraveled.
More than a travel narrative, this memoir is a candid, often darkly funny exploration of flight, fright, and freeze—and what happens when the thing you’re running from turns out to be the person sitting next to you—or the one waiting at the end of the tracks.
If Jenny Diski had taken the train instead of a ship, if Paul Theroux had shared his compartment with some of Hunter S. Thompson’s sketchier friends—and if the Mos Eisley cantina had been a rolling bazaar—you’d have something like Runaway Train.
Each train was a blind date—with brutish bounty hunters, comely opera singers, human traffickers, grifters posing as police (their molls batting eyelashes on the platform), wide-eyed prisoners chained to my top bunk, and surreptitious lovers casting moving shadows, their sounds masked by the primal rumble of the beast train in the middle of the night. You never knew what you were going to get; between the danger and the odd characters were quiet stretches of solitude and unexpected moments of connection.
324 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 10, 2025
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