The Stars at Night...

Twenty-four hours, give or take, that's how long it takes to cross Texas by train.

Marjorie, 62, widowed and retired, who has never been on a train before in her life, sighs and looks out of the window, where the sunset over the horizon is throwing up the sorts of colours that makes me think the dining car manager might have dropped psychedelics in our beer.

"Are we still in Texas?" She asks the passing waitress, who confirms we are with a tight nod of her head, she's busy and her manner suggests she's no time for this sort of frippery. The sun slipped from the desert sky like a stone, so quickly that it was light and then very dark, stunning us all into momentary silence. The three of us new to the sharp vagaries of desert life.

The dining car is a sort of happy lottery of passing strangers (on a train), you're seated with people you've never met, and will probably never meet again. Which is a good and bad thing, the couple I wiled a breakfast away with and who were moving back from Florida to LA (our final stop), to be closer to their kids, would have made good company at any time. He was stationed in Portsmouth in the war and had visited London on leave and was delighted to meet someone who lived there now. He talked fondly of Westminster of the post-wartime era and the English girls he'd met, as his wife looked at him sideways, as if she wasn't sure how he'd ever ended up at our table. I liked them both very much.

That said, Mr Team Bring It - a T-shirt emblazoned with that very legend curled around a Golden Eagle and Stars and Stripes design - made me very happy that they didn't allow guns on the train. Though I'm not sure who was checking them at the door. TBI, as I'll now call him, seemed taken with my whole shaggy demeanour, and each time I walked through the viewing car, he'd give me the universal man nod and a thumbs up as I kept moving quickly through the carriage. He spotted me one day in a Metallica T, and gave a resounding 'Yay!' and moved his shoulders and head like a snake striking prey. Part of me wanted very much to talk to him about his matching white Under Armour cap and slippers (I think they were slippers), and that T-shirt, but part of me simply wanted to live.

I'd left New York days before, rattled through Chicago and boarded the Texas Eagle - much like the eagle on TBI's top, we must assume, threaded our way through St Louis and then down to the border of New Mexico, then across through the Old West, places like Yuma and Tucson, full of folklore and legend. We passed a Border Patrol jeep, two thickset men in wraparound sunglasses, a shotgun set across one of their laps, I stared agog, they looked up at the train, I think they might have been bored of the whole thing, happy to see our silver train go humming by, one more thing to break up this endless, burnt sky.

We passed cattle ranches that reached to the horizon. One solitary gate and a road that literally disappeared from view, the ranch could have been five or fifty miles away, there was no way of telling. I wish I'd brought a Cormac McCarthy novel with me, as we were now living in the worlds he brought to life, there was no reason to be out here unless you were farming or doing something that could make you rich or dead or both. This eerie Texan swampland that was both beautiful and cruel and made me glad I was behind the glass of a cocooned AC cabin.

We broke for an hour in Dallas and I finally had a chance to shave - you try shaving on a moving train, I'd have come home without a nose, it was difficult enough to sleep in the bunk some nights, as we hopped and skipped our way across America. I'd lie there and think, one more bump like that and I'll be thrown out of the window and looking at the quickly departing train with only coyotes for company.

Each time we exited the train, the guard would firmly instruct all passengers what time we'd be leaving and to be back on board ten minutes before. Amtrak weren't waiting for anyone, they were on a schedule.

"That happen a lot?" I asked him as I stepped down onto the hot concrete of the platform. "People missing the train?"

"All the time", he said ruefully, as if trying to comprehend mankind's inability to understand something as straightforward as a train timetable.

It might have been the tone of his instructions, but we all hovered around the ever humming engine like it might take flight at any time and leave us stranded there in Dallas, hopeless among the gleaming glass skyscrapers glinting in the sunshine.

I met a lovely couple from Waco, Texas on that very platform, who had lived in Waco all their lives. They, like a lot of people I met on that trip were retirees, looping the US or simply taking the train so their lives kept moving in some way.

Naturally, when someone mentions that they grew up and lived in Waco, the first and only thing you want to ask is about David Koresh, the mulleted cleric and cult leader who helped lead his flock to their murderous end as the head of the Branch Davidians. But, because Mary and her husband are delightful people and might well be tired of living in a community overshadowed by that terrible massacre, I do something far worse: I suddenly turn towards the train and announce, "Oh God, I think it's leaving without us!" And Mary and her husband, I'm rather ashamed to say, go up in the air like I've just jabbed them with a cattle prod.

Later, when I was thinking about the guard's comments, we pulled up to a tiny station near Big Bend National Park - a sensational hikers paradise, apparently - and as the engine gunned into life and the driver pulled the keening engine's horn, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple running from quite some way away, down the street that bisected the rail line, and they were moving like Olympians reaching for the tape. I'm not sure if they'd got off and wandered too far, or were joining the train at that point - they had no luggage, so I'm assuming the former - and they came like a pack of wolves were in hot pursuit. Open mouthed, gulping air, red-faced, and the man suddenly pulled away from what we must assume was his wife and got a good twenty yards on her. If there had been wolves, then there would have been only one survivor, put it that way. He reached the still static train and looked exultant, like a winner might, she less so as she brought up the rear, her scowl already fulled formed by the time she caught up to him. You could hear the exasperated 'you left me behind' argument begin as soon as they crossed the threshold of the train. A train which didn't then leave for another ten minutes.

The plan was that I would have novel number three - The Everything Room - completed by the time I got to LA, that the train journey would give me the kind of focus needed to finish a book that had already eaten up three years of my life. What's that line about telling God your plans and hearting him laugh... Well, you get it. The book wouldn't be done until the time I got to Toronto, but it got done, but more of that another time, if you can bear it.

But as I sat in my compartment with the seemingly never ending Texas rolling along underneath my wheels, with about as much existential angst as you might imagine a lone Welsh writer can muster that far from home, wondering yet again what the hell I was doing spending what could have been a perfectly pleasant road and rail trip, beating my head against yet another novel, and railing against the world, I thought about Lewis, an ex Navy lifer I'd met in the short lay over in Chicago.

He was waiting for his connection to take him to Seattle on the grandly titled Empire Builder Train and then get a hotel for the night, so that he could join the Coast Starlight Train the next morning and travel the glorious west coast line down to California in daylight, staring out at the sea, somewhere he'd spent most of his adult life. Like a lot of people I met on those four days travelling across the States, he was alone, his partner gone, and now he, like Mary and countless others I met in the dining and viewing cars and on train platforms at various points across the US was moving forwards with no real destination in sight. Sitting in their carriages and compartments and staring at which ever version of their America was sitting outside of their picture window, waiting to be found.