A Dream Rides by

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 towns of Tavistock and even Plymouth. Ling is intelligent as well as beautiful, and works as the school-room assistant. She realizes that the arrival of the railway has the power to change her life, by making the outside world accessible. When she is injured in an accident on the railway, she is rescued by a handsome young doctor, Edward Franfield, and this encounter with a man of education - so different from her dear but dull childhood sweetheart, Barney - is to alter the course of her life forever . . .