Train World

A man dies in our world and wakes on a train with no end — carrying the one thing everyone else lost on the way: his memory. A series of self-contained mysteries aboard colossal, continent-spanning trains.

The books

Book OneThe Ticketless ManTrain World
Book One

The Ticketless Man

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Elliot Marsh died in a supermarket and woke on a train with no end in sight. Everyone aboard arrived the same way — except they remember nothing of before, and he remembers everything. With no ticket and no rights, he is offered a bargain by the train’s Conductor: find something that has gone missing before a glittering first-class concert, and earn his place. An ordinary man, an impossible train, and a great deal he would rather not get involved in.

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Book TwoThe Broken CircuitTrain World
Book Two

The Broken Circuit

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Once every seven years, two great trains run side by side long enough to bridge the gap between them. The Meridian sends Elliot across to the Calloway to collect an old debt — and he finds the debtor dead in his berth, with only hours before the trains part for another seven years. A foreign train, no authority, a clock running down, and a killer who has not yet got off.

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Book ThreeThe Living TrackTrain World
Book Three

The Living Track

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Vashti Kade has spent years drawing maps no one asked for — and she is the only person on the Meridian who has noticed that the route is not quite where it used to be. The track is changing: slowly, quietly, in ways that should not be possible. Finding out why will pull her, a frightened clerk, and a reluctant old hand into a question much larger than one train.

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Book FourThe Still TrainTrain World
Book Four

The Still Train

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A train called The Vantage has stopped — three weeks stalled in the wilds, its engine dead, its food running low, and bandits gathering on the dead stretches the way other people gather a harvest. The Vantage runs on the timetable: rank, ration, and every right pegged to the hour and the mile. But a train that cannot move is a train whose whole constitution has quietly stopped meaning anything. Elliot is sent to help mend an engine. The thing coming apart fastest is not the engine.

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Book FiveThe Long DebtTrain World
Book Five

The Long Debt

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On The Vigil, you are born owing. It runs the worst loop on the network — a frontier circuit through mountain and raider country — and it survives like a fortress: everyone drilled to a function, the carriages armoured, the enemy outside the glue that holds it together. Underneath the watch-rosters runs a ledger. Every passenger owes for their berth, their ration, their protection, and the debt is collected without apology. Cass Renick has collected it for twenty-five years, and made her peace with hardness as the price of survival — until a man comes through the Passage remembering the one thing no arrival should.

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Book SixThe Eastern CircuitTrain World
Book Six

The Eastern Circuit

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On The Calloway you are what you carry. Kit has carried other people’s words her whole life — a message-runner, fast and forgettable, threading the performance-train’s corridors with sealed letters she is paid not to read. When the loops of three great trains converge for a once-in-a-lifetime crossing, her Conductor hands her a simple, well-paid run across the gangway. It goes wrong in ways that are not accidents — and as the trains pull apart for years, Kit finds herself stranded on the wrong one.

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Looking for the maps, timelines, and the workings behind it all? That’s the behind-the-scenes — but it spoils the story, so it sits behind a warning.