Envision mini-mobile hospitals transporting thousands of injured soldiers while whizzing by battlefields, avoiding bombs, while covering tens of thousands of miles a month. Hospital trains are marked with a neutral, universal Red Cross symbol and are well-equipped with doctors, nurses, a cook, and a conductor willing to risk their lives collecting the “walking wounded,” performing surgeries, and transporting soldiers to hospitals and back home. Inspired by her late grandmother’s memories of being a nurse on a WWI hospital train, Kitty shares this compelling untold side of war. As an investigative journalist, educator, and award-winning author, she uncovers a little-known legacy of these “central arteries.”

The research is easy to digest, interspersed with short, historical narratives and news excerpts from engineers, soldiers, and medical personnel's perspectives. Used in 1850, both World Wars, the Korean War, and now in Ukraine; once a source of honour and pride, boosting morale of soldiers, troops, and the public, hospital trains are now a mere shadow of the vital role they played.

Other End Matter: Acknowledgements, end notes
Images: B&W photographs, B&W illustrations
Bibliography: Yes
Index: Yes

Evaluator: Denise N., High School Librarian, BC Books for Schools

Alexandra Kitty is an award-winning author, educator, and artist whose work has appeared in Presstime, Quill, Current, Elle Canada, Maisonneuve, Critical Review, and Skeptic. She was a relationships columnist for the Hamilton Spectator and an advice columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist. She taught language studies at Mohawk College, writing at the Sheridan Institute, communications at Conestoga College, metalwork arts at Niagara College, and art at the Dundas Valley School of Art. She was the first female recipient of the Arch Award from McMaster University, and is the author of a number of books, including Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News; OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism; A New Approach to Journalism; The Art of Kintsugi; and The Dramatic Moment of Fate: The Life of Sherlock Holmes in the Theatre, among others.

Alexandra Kitty's profile page

“Fascinating and well researched. Alexandra Kitty presents history that must be preserved.”
—Patricia W. Sewell (Collier), editor of Healers in World War ll: Oral Histories of Medical Corps Personnel

“Nothing encapsulates the horror of war better than a hospital train standing in a siding near a battlefield waiting for the inevitable casualties of the conflict. A Different Track highlights this largely forgotten feature of warfare and shows how this service, often provided by women whose role, too, has been lost in the midst of time, saved the lives of thousands of wounded men.”
—Christian Wolmar, author of Engines of War and The Liberation Line

“Alexandra Kitty shows us with skill and empathy what the patients, nurses and doctors thought of the hospital trains they served on and the danger and camaraderie that they experienced as the trains wove through battlefields, under strafing by enemy planes. This is an exceptionally well-referenced book and an intriguing read.”
—Marion McKinnon Crook, award-winning author of Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin

“A fascinating look at hospital trains and the people, especially nurses, who made them work.”
—Terry Copp, author of Fields of Fire: The Canadians in Normandy

“A Different Track is a love letter to the hospital trains that wound their way across Europe and North America during the Second World War. Alexandra Kitty draws on newspaper reporting of the time to trace the ways the trains offered a narrative of hope, order, and safety that was sorely needed in the dark days of the conflict.”
—Amy Shaw, co-editor of Making the Best of It: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the Second World War

“The romance of trains collides with the bloodletting of war in a high-stakes game on rails, as told in the pages of this remarkable book. Historian Alexandra Kitty has written a scholarly yet accessible work inspired by her own grandmother’s role as a nurse on a hospital train despite personal tragedy. Millions of soldiers and civilians were saved on these locomotives, despite severely limited resources—thanks to the shockingly downand- dirty methods medical professionals had to resort to in the face of the terrors of world-wide conflict. Absorbing reading, a riveting and well-documented triumph.”
—Jacqueline L. Carmichael, author of Heard Amid the Guns: True Stories from the Western Front, 1914–1918