Train travel from children's books to spy books

When the kids were growing up, they all enjoyed the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. The original ones by Reverend W. Awdry. One item, much commented on, was the distinctively interactive nature of riding on trains. Thomas and his pals were always coming off the rails, coming up short against a rock fall, stopping at a collapsed tunnel, failing to climb a steep grade, etc. And always, the long suffering passengers had to get out, dig, push, and otherwise help the trains get through.

Brought to mind by a passage in a book I just finished. Spies of the Balkans by Alan Furst. A great find. I love coming across an established author with a good backlog of books. From the blurb:

Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. As Adolf Hitler plans to invade the Balkans, spies begin to circle—and Costa Zannis, a senior police official, must deal with them all. He is soon in the game, working to secure an escape route for fugitives from Nazi Berlin that is protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters—and hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a shipping magnate. With extraordinary historical detail and a superb cast of characters, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world’s evil.

Furst is apparently well noted for his historical accuracy.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. Salonika in particular is a city with a fascinating history and anything that teaches me more about it is appreciated. Furst does a great job of highlighting small details and rendering and in general creating an atmosphere of Casablanca of the Balkans.

Another favorite author, Lawrence Durrell, wrote a number of books about pre- and post-war Greece and Yugoslavia. Some of the humorous ones were collected together in Antrobus Complete which also included some stories of the perils of train travel in the Balkans.

The passage in Spies of the Balkans which connected both Thomas the Tank Engine and Lawrence Durrell was this one:

As instructed, Zannis left as soon as he could - the first train out at midday. But they made slow progress; stopped for a herd of sheep crossing the track, stopped because of overheating after a climb up a long grade, slowed to a crawl in a sudden snowstorm, stopped for no apparent treason at a town on the river Morava, somewhere north of Nis, the name of the station not to be found on the timetable. It was the fault of the engineer, someone said; who had halted the train for a visit with his girlfriend. Late at night, Zannis arrived in Nis, where the train that was to take him south was long gone.