Since I’m already on the couch and you appear to be taking notes, I thought I’d talk about all those railways. There are two railways in Requiem for Noah. Okay, one of them is underwater, but still… Requiem for Mary Mac takes place at the Halton Radial Train Museum, where they retire and maintain streetcars. The fourth Weiss book has a railway too, or at least the memory of one. It used to run along the lakefront from Hamilton to Burlington and crossed at the bottom of Brant Street right downtown. Somehow Carly will find herself walking those tracks along with other Burlington folk.

And then there are all those odd paintings I did: ancient looking puffers and antique carriages clicking through blue landscapes. The paintings, the odd ones anyway, started after a trip I took to Washington D.C. I was visiting the Air and Space Museum and I came across a gallery devoted to the drawings of Rowland Emmet. Here was a British cartoonist, the one who designed the gadgets for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, who indulged his whimsical love of railways with charming little line drawings of midcentury stations and trains—and they were being taken seriously as art by a national gallery! I was still playing around with realism then, but this looked like a lot more fun. And so I started drawing images of steam engines with cow catchers and funnels, chuffing along over bridges and through crumbling tunnels. I did precarious looking planes and unseaworthy boats too, but the trains kept coming.

I suppose I never got over my first electric train set. It was a Hornby Dublo, a lovely blue steamliner named after Sir Nigel Gresley, a British locomotive engineer, and it had elegant carriages made of the very finest tin. It would rumble round and round…

When I was growing up in Scotland, my family would sometimes walk though Edinburgh’s Prince’s Street Gardens below the castle, and the rail line ran straight through the gardens parallel to the main street. There was a pedestrian bridge down there, and you could stand on it while the trains steamed underneath. This was before diesel, and the blast of the steam hit the underside of the bridge billowing white clouds in front of you and blasting up behind. It was  sensation to tuck away in my long term memory, beside all those brief amazing moments that seem to mean something, but you’re not sure what.

One of the defining moments of my life took place in Waverley Station right there in the heart of Edinburgh. I can still picture myself in the carriage, about to leave the city, and all my relatives and friends. We were immigrating to Canada and it felt like my only sure possession was a young adult science fiction novel given to me by my aunt: To Worlds Unknown. I lost myself in that fantasy of space travel as the miles to Glasgow’s Prestwick Airport ticked by.

Okay the symbolism of the journey is pretty obvious, but what about incline railways? They’re actually quite common up in Muskoka where cottages are often perched high above the lake. Families use them to ferry luggage and people up from their boat, but they come much larger than that. When I was little, my family would holiday in England at a seaside town called Scarborough. Scarborough, like its Canadian namesake, was mounted on a bluff and to get to the water you had to descend an almost vertical slope. Incline railways, or funiculars, run on a sort of triangular undercarriage that keeps you level as you sink down the slope. I rode a much bigger one in Pittsburgh, and it gave me the idea for the climactic scene when my detectives are confronted with the… well, the thing; you’ll have read Requiem for Noah to find out more about what happens up there on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment.

When you do, you’ll understand why I have to lie on the couch while you scribble on your clipboard. Or do psychiatrists use iPads now? That would be depressing in itself.

It’s strange, but I have a lingering memory of a much earlier book, and to this day I can see the page in the eye of my inner child. The boy hero is confronted one evening with an alluring carriage in the shape of a swan. Clearly he’s meant to get in, but he has no idea where the swan will take him.

He gets in anyway.