Just about 50 years ago, needing money to support my family — my novels weren’t bestsellers — I had the idea of taking the longest train trip imaginable and writing a travel book about it. I was then an alien in England, living in Catford, a seedy district in southeast London. But Catford was on a railway line. That meant I could walk to Catford Bridge Station, board a train to Charing Cross and thence to Victoria for the boat-train to Paris, and onward to
