He finished his coffee, slid his papers into a folder and took me forward again to the horse car. The dragon answered belligerently to his knock and stared at me disapprovingly.'He is Tommy,' George said. 'He is a security guard for Merry amp; Co, eh? He has the run of the whole train under my authority.'

She bowed in her turn to an irresistible force and let us in with raised eyebrows and an air of power suspended, not abdicated. She produced a clipboard with a sheet of ruled paper attached. 'Sign here,' she said. 'Everyone who comes in here has to sign. Put the date and time.'

I signed Tommy Titmouse in a scrawl and put the time. Filmer, I was interested to see, had been to see his horse before departure.

We walked forward into the horse car with George pointing things out.

'There are eleven stalls, see? In the old days they carried twenty-four horses in a car, but there was no centre aisle, eh? No passage for anyone between stops. They don't carry horses by train much now. This car was built in 1958, eh? One of the last, one of the best. 'There was a single stall lengthwise against the wall on each side of the entrance door, then a space, then two more box-stalls, one on each side, then a space where big sliding doors gave access to the outer world for loading and unloading. Next came a wider central space with a single box on one side only. Then two more boxes and another space for loading, then two more boxes and a space, and finally another box on each side of the far forward door. Eleven boxes, as promised, with a central aisle.

The boxes were made of heavy green-painted panels of metal slotted and blotted together; dismantleable. In the wide centre space, where one box alone stood along one wall, there was a comfortable chair for the redoubtable Ms Brown, along with a table, equipment lockers, a refrigerator and a heavy plastic water tank with a tap low down for the filling of buckets. George opened the top lid of the tank and showed me a small plank floating on the surface.

'It stops the water sloshing about so much, eh?'

Eh indeed, I thought.

There were dozens of bales of hay everywhere possible, and a filled hay-net swinging gently above each horse's head. A couple of grooms sat around on bales while their charges nibbled their plain fare and thought mysterious equine thoughts.

Each box had the name of its occupant thoughtfully provided on a typewritten card slotted into a holder on the door. I peered at a few of them, identifying Filmer and Daffodil's Laurentide Ice as a light grey clot with brittle-looking bones, the Lorrimores' Voting Right as an unremarkable bay, and the Young's Sparrowgrass as a bright chestnut with a white star and sock.

'Come on,' George said. 'Meet the engineers, eh?' He wasn't a horse man, himself.

'Yes. Thank you.'

He opened the forward door of the horse van with a key, and with a key also let us through into the baggage car.

'The doors are kept locked, eh?'

I nodded. We swayed down the long baggage car, which was half empty of freight and very noisy, and George, having told me to remove and lay aside my waistcoat in case I got oil on it, unlocked the door at the far end. If I'd thought it noisy where we were, where we went made talking impossible.

George beckoned and I followed through a door into the heat of the rear section of the engines, the section containing among other things the boiler which provided steam to heat the whole train. George pointed wordlessly to an immense tank of water and with amusement showed me the system for telling the quantity of the contents. At intervals up the huge cylinder there were normal taps, the sort found over sinks. George pointed to the figures beside each, which were in hundreds of gallons, and made tap-turning motions with his hands. One turned on the taps, I understood with incredulity, to discover the level of the contents. Supremely logical, I supposed, if one had never heard of gauges.

We went on forward into a narrow passage beside yards of hot hammering engine of more than head height, throbbingly painful to the senses, and then passed over a coupling into another engine, even longer, even noisier, even hotter, the very stuff of hell. At the forward end of that we came to a glass-panelled door, which needed no key, and suddenly we were in the comparative quietness of the drivers' cab, right at the front of the train.

There was fresh cool air there, as the right-hand window, next to the bank of controls in front of the engineer's seat, was wide open. When I commented on it, George said that that window was open always except in blizzards, eh?

Through the wide forward unopening windows there was a riveting view of the rails stretching ahead, signals shining green in the distance, trees flashing back at a useful seventy miles an hour. I'd never been in the cab of a moving train before, and I felt I could have stayed there all day.

At the controls sat a youngish man in no sort of uniform, and beside him sat an older man in cleanish overalls with grease on his fingers.

George made introductions. 'Robert', that was the younger, and 'Mike', the elder. They nodded and shook hands when George explained my position. 'Give him help, if he asks for it.'

They said they would. George patted Robert on the shoulder and pointed out to me a small white flag blowing stiffly outside to the right of the front windows.

'That flag shows this is a special train. Not in the timetable. It's so all railwaymen along the way don't think the Canadian is running thirty minutes early.'

They all thought it a great joke. Trains never ran early the world over. Late was routine.

Still chuckling, George led the way back through the glass door into the inferno. We inched again past the thundering monster and its second string to the rear, and emerged at last into the clattering reverberating peace of the baggage car where I was reunited with my waistcoat. My suitcase, I was interested to see, stood in a quiet row of others, accessible enough if I wanted it.

George locked the baggage car door behind us and we stood again in the quiet horse car which looked homely and friendly with the horses' heads poking forward over the doors. It was interesting, I thought, that as far as they were able in their maybe four-foot-wide stalls, most of them were standing diagonally across the space, the better to deal with the motion; and they all looked alert and interested, sure signs of contentment.

I rubbed the noses of one or two under the frowning suspicious gaze of Ms Brown who was not pleased to be told that she should let me in whenever I asked, eh?

George chuckled his way out of the horse car and we meandered back down the train together, George stopping to check for news with each sleeping-car attendant and to solve any problems. There was a sing-song in progress in the dome car and the racegoers in the dayniter had formed about four separate card schools with cash passing briskly.

The overworked and gloomy chef in the main dining car had not lost his temper altogether and only a few passengers had grumbled that the roomettes were too cramped; the most usual disgruntlement, George said.

No one was ill, no one was drunk, no one was fighting. Things, George said eventually, were going so smoothly that one should expect disaster any time now, eh?

We came at last to his office which was basically a roomette like my own: that is to say, it was a seven-by-four-foot space on one side of a central corridor, containing a washbasin, a folding table and two seats, one of which concealed what the timetable coyly called 'facilities'. One could either leave the sliding door open and see the world go by down the corridor, or close oneself into a private cocoon; and at night, one's bed descended from the ceiling and on to the seat of the facilities which effectively put them out of use.