The Up Train

About this book

The old Highlands Railway climbed out of the Rift a century ago through tea country and forest to the hill towns, and died in pieces through the eighties, and the government's new heritage revival now proposes to bring it back. Wanjiru Kamau, thirty six, railway heritage engineer, is sent up the dead line to survey what remains: rusted rail, swallowed sidings, and at the line's loveliest curve, the impossible thing the survey drones had photographed and nobody had believed. Kilima Halt: intact. Platform swept. Signals oiled. Garden blooming. Clock wound. The keeper is Mzee Baraka Odhiambo, eighty nine, stationmaster from 1958, who never accepted the closure, has signed the log every day since, and greets her on the platform with the timetable of trains that stopped running before she was born.