posted on 17 Aug 2025

The Sleeper Train by Mick Jackson and Baljinder Kaur

There’s something deeply exotic about the notion of a sleeper train – they hold the promise of exciting journeys and intrepid travel. Or, if you’re like me, they speak of indulgent comfort and an age now gone by where characters in lavish Edwardian  splendour conduct mysterious trysts. 

All this is probably because I’ve grown up on a small island and it’s not often that it’s necessary to use sleeper trains. But for those going long distances, sleeper trains are an indispensable utility and are rarely as glamorous as in my fevered imagination. I have used a sleeper train once, as a young teenager, on a school trip around parts of Europe in the 1960s and, for lots of reasons, it was a rather disappointing experience – but I can’t honestly say that was because of the train or because of the twenty or so vile adolescents that were sharing the carriage with me.

Author Mick Jackson and illustrator Balinder Kaur have produced a book  - The Sleeper Train – that goes a good way to restoring my delight in the idea of the sleeper. A young girl and her family board a train at the start of a long journey to visit family friends:

“For a while we sat and looked out of the window.

Then Mum said it was bedtime.

We pulled down the bunks.

We each had our own.

We talked a bit.

Then Dad said it was time we went to sleep.”

But the little girl is far too excited to sleep – she looks out of the window and wonders whether it might help to remember all the different places she’s slept before.

She remembers other holidays in hotels, falling asleep on the beach, in a tent when they were camping or even the time she had to spend nights in hospital. She also remembers the cosy times she has stayed before with her Grandma and Grandad and, as she is finally falling asleep, she thinks about all those people in their beds in the towns the train is whizzing past.

And when she finally wakes up the next morning it’s time for a visit to the dining car for breakfast before the train arrives and they can see all their friends on the platform:

“A new day in a different city.”

And now, if ever she has trouble sleeping, she can remember what it felt like on the sleeper train:

“I remember how it felt to be rocked by the train, just like a baby…”

The book is a delightful story and is an absolute feast of illustration from artist Baljinder Kaur. Her website tells us:

“She enjoys exploring through themes of the fantastical, the allegorical and the enchantingly ordinary. Her work often, and intimately reflects through the lens of a Panjabi and Sikh diaspora existence.”

These ideas certainly inform the drawings you’ll find filling the pages here and they work with the words to make the book a big experience.

Available now from Walker Books, you will be able to get a copy from your local independent bookshop – who will be happy to order it for you if they don’t have it on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

August 2025