'I'm working for Merry amp; Co,' I said.
She looked me up and down. 'You're an attendant,' she said flatly. 'You're not coming in.'
She was quivering with authority, the resolute governess guarding the pass. Maybe forty, I judged, with regular features, no make-up and a slim wiry figure in shirt, sweater and jeans. I knew an immovable object when I saw it, and I retreated through the first sleeping car, where grooms in T-shirts lolled in open day compartments (shut off by heavy felt curtains for sleeping), on my way to consult with the Chinese chef in the forward dome car's kitchen.
'The Conductor?' he said in answer to my question. 'He is here.' He pointed along the corridor towards the dining section. 'You're lucky.'
The Conductor, in his grey suit with gold bars of long service on his left sleeve, was sitting at the first table past the kitchen, finishing his lunch. There were other diners at other tables, but he was alone, using his lunch break to fill in papers laid out on the cloth. I slid into one of the seats opposite him and he raised his eyes enquiringly.
'I'm from Merry amp; Co,' I said. 'I believe you know about me.'
'Tommy?' he said, after thought.
'Yes.'
He put a hand across the table, which I shook.
'George Burley,' he said. 'Call me George.'
He was middle-aged, bulky, close cropped as to hair and moustache and with, I discovered, a nice line in irony.
I explained about the impasse at the door of the horse car.
His eyes twinkled, 'You've met the dragon-lady, eh? Ms Leslie Brown. They sent her to keep the grooms in order. Now she tries to rule the train, eh?'
He had the widespread Canadian habit of turning the most ordinary statement into a question. It's a nice day, eh?
'I hope,' I said politely, 'that your authority outranks hers.'
'You bet your life,' he said. 'Let me finish these papers and my lunch and we'll go along there, eh?'
I sat for a while watching the scenery slide by, wild uninhabited stretches of green and autumn-blazing trees, grey rocks and blue lakes punctuated by tiny hamlets and lonely houses, all vivid in the afternoon sunshine, a panoramic impression of the vastness of Canada and the smallness of her population.
'Right,' George said, shuffling his papers together. 'I'll just finish my coffee, eh?'
'Is there,' I asked, 'a telephone on the train?'
He chuckled. 'You bet your life. But it's a radio phone, eh? It only works near cities where they have receiver/ transmitters. At small stations, we have to get off and use the regular phones on the ground, like the passengers do at longer stops.'
'But can anyone use the train telephone?' I asked.
He nodded. 'It's a pay phone by credit card, eh? Much more expensive. Most people stretch their legs and go into the stations. It's in my office.' He anticipated my question. 'My office is in the first sleeping car aft of the central dining car.'
'My roomette is there,' I said, working it out.
'There you are, then. Look for my name on the door.'
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.