This book offers a captivating saga of thwarted passions, set in nineteenth-century Devon. In August 1883, the first steam train on the new Princetown branch line makes its halting passage across Dartmoor, stopping near the quarrymen's hamlet of Foggintor. For Ling Southcott and her young sister, Fanny, this is a momentous event, for the railway will connect their isolated village to the neighbouring town of Tavistock, and even Plymouth. Ling realizes that the arrival of the railway has the power to change her life, by making the outside world accessible.