Train to Yesterday- Nell DuVall

Train to Yesterday
Nell DuVall
Five Star, Feb 2008, $25.95
ISBN 9781594146633

Railroad heiress Penny Barton works as the marketing director of Ohio-based HyperTrans. Penny arranges a special promo of the firm’s product safe high-speed rail. A set is made to look like it is 1855 and Penny rides a mid nineteenth century steam engine train through a tunnel. She meets Fletcher Dawe, whom she assumes is a reenactment actor.

Penny and Fletcher are attracted to one another but he assumes she is a lying saboteur as no one knows Penny. She in turn cannot find him until she sees the photo circa 1855. She further learns how her family earned their fortune, that Fletcher was a merchant who invested in high-speed rail; and the tragic death of canal lockmaster Dan Hudson. When Penny faints, she awakens in 1855 to a world in which the transportation industry violently competes between those who support the railroads and those who back the flatboats sailing the Ohio canals.

This an interesting time travel romance with a vivid look at 1855 through the eyes of the twenty-first century heroine at how her family made their money. Although Penny adapts too easily and the romance between her and Fletcher takes a back seat to historical panorama of pre Civil War Ohio, sub-genre fans will enjoy buy a ticket to rid the TRAIN TO YESTERDAY.

Harriet Klausner