One of the mainstays of Ontario’s economy is the production of top-quality high-speed rail feasibility studies. Please understand that we have no intention of ever actually building such things. Indeed, passenger rail travel in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada is in inexorable decline. Still, reading about speculative rail systems is jolly fun. Thus, the studies—and also fictional works like these five stories about trains, each one remarkable in its own way.
“The Roads Must Roll” by Robert Heinlein (1940)
America’s economy is dependent on the Roads, rolling belts that host whole communities. Therefore, America’s economy is dependent on the workers who make the Roads roll. The strike of ‘66 showed the power of the workers’ righteous fury. The management took this lesson from the strike: do your level best to ensure that workers never again have sufficient will and unity to strike. Management assures itself that the workers are well paid and get ample benefits. This should be enough to quell discontent. Right?
The Functionalists believe that that if America’s economy is utterly dependent on the Roads, then whoever controls the Roads should rightly give the orders. Who better than the Guild, the people whose hard work makes the Roads roll? Specifically, who better than Guild member Van Kleeck, a man utterly committed to gaining personal power and utterly indifferent to the cost his quest might inflict on others. An anti-union screed typical of its time.
***
Inverted World by Christopher Priest (1974)
The City of Earth creeps across a surrealistic landscape under a distorted sun at a snail’s pace: one mile in ten days. Forever pursuing the enigmatic optimum, the City’s population is organized around the task of keeping the City moving. Track creates the rails on which the City moves, Traction propels the City, the Militia guards the City from the barbarians around it, and surveyors like Helward Mann scout the path Earth will follow.
It’s a difficult existence. Work is burdensome and constant. The women of the City bear few children; the City must draft barbarian women to bear children. Nevertheless, Helward and people like him do their bit to keep their home crawling westward. Now, however, the journey may be at its end. Ahead of the City is an ocean, vast and unbridgeable…
***
Supertrain by Donald E. Westlake1 and Earl W. Wallace (1979)
No discussion of speculative train systems would be complete without mentioning NBC’s remarkable (if short-lived) television series.
Winfield Root, chairman of the Trans Allied Corporation, commands the construction of an “atom-powered steam turbine machine capable of crossing this country in thirty-six hours.” In a scant twenty-two months, Trans Allied’s visionary engineers race from concept to finished product. America finally has the nuclear-powered train absolutely nobody except one flamboyantly bewhiskered oligarch has requested!
The Supertrain is huge. It runs on special broad-gauge rails and boasts a bewildering range of amenities: stores, gymnasiums, a pool, a medical centre, and of course, the disco no late-1970s community could do without. Like some sort of land-going Love Boat, it offers almost anything a person could want, save perhaps for any choice in destination (If your destination is not track adjacent—special-track adjacent, in this case—you cannot use Supertrain to get there.)
Supertrain offers its passengers luxury, adventure, romance, and a weird mismatch between its internal and external dimensions. What did it offer NBC as the series failed to launch? A close brush with bankruptcy.
***
Night Train to Rigel by Timothy Zahn (2006)
Detective Frank Compton, investigating a mysterious death, uses a train ticket found on the corpse. This is no ordinary train ticket. Ordinary trains span continents; the Quadrail spans the stars.
As it turns out, he may be just what the Quadrail system needs. The alien who administers the Quadrail tries to intercept plotters and saboteurs before they can disrupt service. Too bad that the alien is lousy at intelligence work. Now, Frank may be a hairless ape from an unremarkable world, but he’s also a former intelligence officer—one who might be the last, best hope of the Quadrail…and the people of Earth.
***
“The New Year Train” by Hao Jingfang
The innovative Homeward Bound train is a response to the enormous transport demands of the Spring Festival season, during which millions of people travel home for the holidays. It sets out…and vanishes. The train and its fifteen hundred passengers have inexplicably disappeared.
The genius Li Dapang, who designed the new train, tells skeptical reporters that there is no need to panic. The mass disappearance was expected. Everyone on the train is alive and well. They’re merely traversing a point in the space-time continuum previously unknown to humanity. Li is utterly confident the train will reappear! (Albeit at space-time coordinates as yet to be determined…)
***
No doubt some of you are even now raising steam to berate me for omitting some railway-focused work. What can I say? Sometimes Atlas shrugs. Feel free mention the works I overlooked in the comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Westlake co-wrote the pilot for “Supertrain.” I did not know that!
Glad you mentioned The Inverted World. I would have also included Railsea by China Mieville.
I like that the Rolling Road illustration shows Road Security on their Segways.
“A tumblebug does not give a man dignity, since it is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized on a single wheel. But it is perfectly adapted to patrolling the maze of machinery ‘down inside’, since it can go through an opening the width of a man’s shoulders, is easily controlled and will stand patiently upright, waiting, should its rider dismount.“
How about Railsea by China Miéville?
It’s been awhile since I read it, but there is a novel by China Mieville titled Railsea. The world is covered with crisscrossing tracks, and trains are used like we would use boats (including to harpoon their whale-sized moles).
“One of the mainstays of Ontario’s economy is the production of top-quality high-speed rail feasibility studies” – I choked on my coffee, spattering keyboard and both monitors, had to explain myself to coworkers (I kept my rant brief), and then texted three people my glee. Thank you for this.
(No one but Ontarioans (?? we don’t really say that) understands how horribly true it is.)
(Also, a train was going by my office at exactly the right moment.)
Another one would be “Rails Across the Galaxy” by Richard K. Lyon and Andrew J. Offutt, in Analog SFSF from August to mid-September 1982.
Kitchener actually built its proposed light-rail system. While this was about a century after a much more ambitious electric rail system was proposed, the original proposal had the bad luck of competing with Canada’s involvement in the Great War for resources. On the plus side, while Waterloo Region drivers seem incapable of resisting the urge to cut in front of trains, at least our light-rail rails don’t leap gazelle-like from the rails. Which is more than Ottawa can say.
In the first set of Commonwealth books by Peter F. Hamilton, interstellar travel happens mostly via train through wormholes. Instead of spaceports, there are big railway depots with portals running all across the galaxy.
Anime fans may bring up Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. What’s the best mode of transportation during a zombie apocalypse? Obviously, an armored war train!
Supertrain has a more successful modern successor in Snowpiercer.
“That Hell-Bound Train” by Robert Bloch is what came first to mind. There’s a train. It’s bound for Hell. A rail-riding hobo arguably shouldn’t have taken the deal he was offered.
Oh, and a Lord Darcy mystery, “Murder on the Napoli Express”, which was a riff on & criticism of “Murder on the Orient Express”.
And of course I must mention Railsea by China Miéville.
“The Railways Up on Cannis”, by Colin Kapp. New Worlds, October 1959 (as I was being born!) One of his Unorthodox Engineer stories.
Obviously in movies (and TV) there’s Snowpiercer.
And, too, anytime we talk about trains in SF, we should mention John M. Ford. His novel Growing Up Weightless is about trains on the Moon, and also his wonderful (fantasy) poem “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station”.
Besides Railsea, I’d nominate Miéville’s Iron Council, with the train-based rebel movement.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Blue Mars, 2312) and Charles Stross (Saturn’s Children) both features train cities on Mercury
One of the Lord Darcy fantasy-mysteries by Randall Garrett was a sly commentary on Agatha Christie with the story set on “The Napoli Express.”
Don’t forget about Galaxy Express 999! Anime has more than one example of space trains.
I thought about the Offutt but I don’t have those Analogs and no publisher ever picked up the story.
Galaxy 999, anyone?
Supertrain was so obviously in The Love Boat and Fantasy Island ilk that it was either going to be embraced by people who loved those shows or rejected by them (it certainly wasn’t going to draw in viewers from outside that category). I think I watched part of the first episode before I switched to another channel. I wonder what Westlake added to it.
But then, I am shocked, shocked, that you didn’t mention Time Express.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078702/
Would A Subway Named Mobius count?
The Celestial Steam Locomotive by Michael Coney
Mighty Good Road by Melissa Scott
Transit by Ben Aaronovitch (one of the New Dr Who Adventures featuring the 7th Doctor)
Ed: Ooh! Forgot In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade by Ian Watson!
Snowpiercer?
Unfortunately, the late great Dick Lupoff’s hilarious Sacred Locomotive Flies does not fit this categorty — there are planes, autombiles, and ground-effect vehicles, but (so far as I recall) no trains.
@16: James, I have those Analogs, but I never read the serial. Even back then it seemed, well, not very promising.
The Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley, although the trains are more like rail-less giant land-cruisers (pulling double duty as land-based aircraft carriers). Actual trains, monorails and even old-fashioned steam trains do play smaller roles in the narrative.
Final Fantasy VII, one of the greatest SFF CRPGs of all time, famously starts on a train, and trains play key role at several points in the plot.
Any Transformers story involving the perpetually-confused Astrotrain (“So if you can get around by transforming into an interstellar spacecraft, what the hell is the point of being able to turn into a train as well?” “SHUT UP!”), naturally.
Subways are trains, aren’t they? I remember a story about a subway where one train kept disappearing into an interdimensional pocket (until another train entered the pocket, spitting the first one back out). Google tells me the story is “A Subway Named Moebius” by A.J. Deutsch from 1950.
@@@@@7. James Davis Nicoll
Re driver vs train
Here on the Scenic Central Calif Coast™, Amtrak runs the Coast Starlight and I once took it on a rescue mission to a San Diego burb, the details of which are unneeded here. It was a pleasant enough trip – I’d been tipped off to pay a bit extra for business class (less crowded) and the wi-fi worked. Mostly. But others have pointed out recurring problems:
A) Drunks have the sad habit of falling asleep on the tracks in the Sta Barbara area. This does not end well for them. As the mortality rate is ±100%, a police report is required. If the police happen to be busy with live customers….
OK, there are more recurring probs. But, basically, the train is practical if & only if you don’t need to get there at any particular time!
There’s always the Bethlehem-Ares Railroad on Mars.
My mother lived in a house that happened to be down the tracks from her school, so every morning she and her chums would walk the mile to the school next to the tracks. One morning they found what was left of someone who fell asleep on the tracks. To hear her tell it, he was scattered in small pieces pretty much the whole distance she had to walk. One might think having heard such an elevating childhood story would have made me extra careful when circumstance required I also navigate tracks on the way to grade one. In fact, I came pretty close to obliviously wandering in front of the afternoon train. The only reason I didn’t was I dropped something I was carrying ten metres from the track and stopped to retrieve it, which took just enough time for the train to arrive.
There is also Ian McDonald’s totally wonderful Ares Express. Trains on Mars. Glorious book that should be much better known.
Felix Gilman’s Half-Made World has the industrial “Line” faction that pretty much worships malevolent deity-like mega engines. The scenes drip with dieselpunk imagery.
I’d have to nominate Iron Council as the single worst RR-adjacent SFFH work. Perdido Street Station and The Scar are sublime masterpieces. Iron Council is the worst I’ve EVER been let down by a book.
@12
And also “Riding the Hammer,” which introduces trains to the Liavek shared world.
Philip Reeve’s YA novel Railhead involves interstellar travel by rail (the trains pass through specially constructed wormholes). And, of course, the climax of Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas includes trains – briefly, and explosively.
Another Analog serial that fits this category is Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, from 1972, a sort of alternate history proto-steampunk romp.
The Fountains of Paradise is about a very vertical train
A couple others are”
Raising Steam – Terry Pratchett, a late Discworld novel.
Shadow of the Ship – Robert W. Franson. Many worlds (but not Earth) are connected by some sort of multi-dimensional paths. People can travel the paths in trains hauled by the elephantine “Waybeasts”/
@28, James, I say this with love and concern, how have you managed to live this long???
Personally I was terrified of train tracks and wouldn’t go anywhere near them as a kid. I still keep my distance as an adult.
ecbatan@23: I remember quite enjoying it, actually. I have no idea how it would hold up to a re-read, of course.
The Overtrend is a small but significant plot point in Jack Vance’s Emphyrio, though Ghyl and his father usually preferred walking instead.
The first story in Keith Robert’s fixup, Pavan, involves a railroad engine.
In Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest, Prince Rupert of the Rhine escapes captivity by hitching a ride on a railroad engine.
Yes, that’s an anachronism. So it goes when Shakespeare is The Great Historian.
Sarah Monette has a beautiful, odd little story “Katabasis: Seraphic Trains” in her collection Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which I think deserves to better known. The city metro seems to be sharing the tracks with other trains, that have destinations far beyond the city and strange passengers that can be glimpsed through the windows.Sometimes, if you’re blessed or merely unlucky, one of them might stop for you.
While I’m on the subterranean track (as it were), there’s Lisa Goldstein’s Dark Cities Underground, in which the subways of the world link up with and connect the underworlds of various mythologies. I didn’t think it was one of her best books, the underworlds never came into focus.
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere made some use of subways as well.
R.A. Lafferty’s sublime “Interurban Queen.”
@26
It’s a problem with all trains. I remember commutes that got delayed because of someone being where they shouldn’t have been. One where the straying pedestrian survived, though probably with a shortened lifespan – he was jogging on the tracks with headphones on. The train slowed way down, waiting for him to wake up and notice. Which he eventually did. And there was the morning we were waiting for our train to arrive, and admiring the special train that was parked there, having run into a truck loaded with paint and, I suspect, spackle or stucco, judging by the splashes and the bent ladders and whatnot on the locomotive and the first car. (UP executives on their way to a job site; we got to see the cooks setting up breakfast, and waved at them as we went to cross the tracks to our own train. Mahogany woodwork!)
N.K. Jemison’s The You Train, from her collection How Long ‘Til Black Future Month.
Midnight Meat Train by Clive Barker.
@20: Ben Aaronovitch returns to the (London “Tube”) (not all) subway in the “Rivers of London” fantasy series (magical inhabitants of London – as seen by the city police – include genius loci of many rivers), as it’s an important public transport service. “Whispers Under Ground” is an instalment where a murder victim staggers out of a train tunnel late at night, but it’s a mystery where he came from (Albany, N.Y., according to his driving licence, but that isn’t the magic part).
The World President’s private intercontinental vacuum-subway is represented in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rescue Party” (1946, set later), implying that Elon Musk is going to be World President. Everyone else had a helicopter though.
Lin Carter and Randall Garrett’s “Masters of the Metropolis” portrays a thrilling journey by “Subway Train” in the Year 1956.
Space Train, by Terence Haile. A rocket-powered train jumps the rails into space, where it is menaced by giant crabs. I’d call it a product of its time, but that was the early 1970s, and the plot’s more worthy of 1920s pulps.
There was a BBC series called ‘The Last Train’ which had the whole train and passengers ‘frozen’ in time inside a tunnel whilst the apocalypse happened in the outside world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) [Here be spoilers]
Quote from the TV Tropes page https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolTrain
“Sean McMullen’s Greatwinter Trilogy features trains powered by wind turbines and trains powered by passengers and employed navvies pedaling. Passengers are ranked according to how much they pedal, and those who pedal most get credits towards their fare and priority use of the railside facilities.”
@james Davis Nicoll: Ottawa for many years had a “demonstration line” than ran for five stations North-South and never failed, even in the worst weather. Once it had proved its mettle the city built a much larger line from East to West, with a different gauge and a variety of car which have, as you note, a habit of falling off the rails. Naturally, the city’s decision was to tear up old line that worked and spend several years replacing it with the new trains that don’t.
I’m glad somebody else mentioned “Riding the Hammer” upthread so I don’t have to, but I will point out that as far as I know it’s the only fantasy story that features a genuine Goddess of Railways – or at least somebody applying for the job.
Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series makes a lot of use of railways which link the different self-governing enclaves and in some cases are outside normal space and time.
There’s another Unorthodox Engineers railway story by Colin Kapp – The Subways of Tazoo, where the engineers are drafted in to help archaeologists with a weird alien city to explore, and start off by working on its transport system.
And a fairly obscure one – Summer in 3000 by Peter Martin has intercontinental subways linking various underground cities, if I’m remembering it correctly they follow parabolic paths which take them well down towards the Earth’s core. The same idea was later used in L. Neil Smith’s novels.
Forgot another one – An Express of the Future (1895) by Michel Verne (published in the UK as by his father, Jules Verne, because the editor assumed that the M stood for Monsieur!) – features 1800 KPH transatlantic pneumatic railways. Its on my web site
http://forgottenfutures.co.uk/express/express.htm
@12: I was wondering how long it would take for someone to remember Growing Up Weightless, which was my introduction to just how good Ford could be. (I missed The Dragon Waiting when it came out.)
@19: if Our Columnist is allowed giant conveyor belts, I’d certainly support fiction about a subway — at least the latter runs on rails. Not that the proposed rail map is actually plausible (a rail-fan friend tried to draw from the description and came up with a horror), but I suspect that’s true of a lot of rail fiction.
@40: that’s a bit of stretch: the entity is a steam-powered road train. Roberts may have been inspired by the chains of trailers that run through the empty parts of Australia, but I don’t know whether they were common ~60 years ago.
@47: There’s also “The Furthest Station”, in which the team have to deal with a haunted subway. It reads like an exception to my complaint above; there’s a lot of entanglement with new rolling stock and lines. (Possibly the difference is that Aaronovitch is a Londoner, while AFAIK A. J. Deutch was not a Bostonian.) And Clarke also uses a train — trans-oceanic, in this case — between the two surviving Earth cities a billion years in the future, in The City and the Stars.
wrt the various stories of blocked real-world trains: a group of fans booked a piece of a train from ?NYC? to Kansas City for the 1976 Worldcon. The train was held up for some time in ?Indianapolis?, reportedly because a Jesse Jackson speech (which I heard bits of while driving to the convention) was so spellbinding that nobody wanted to interrupt to ask to have a car un-parked from the main line tracks.
T Kingfisher’s “The Tomato Thief” https://apex-magazine.com/the-tomato-thief/ is not about trains per se, but includes train-gods and train-priests and a bargain between the trains and the desert.
Railways and trains and their engineers have played major roles through the “second act” of Girl Genius.
44: The late John Prine’s Bruised Orange features a fatal train mishap of that sort:
When I was coming back from the Montreal Worldcon, we had just passed Guelph when I noticed car parts flying past my train window. Generally, the ideal number of air born car parts is somewhere in the vicinity of zero so I deduced mistakes were made. In this case, it was stopping at a railway crossing with the front bumper sticking into the volume through which the train passed. No injuries but going by how how of the car I saw go by, the car was probably a write-off. I was late getting home because of course the whole train had to inspected to make there was no damage.
I remember Barbara Feldman interviewing a train engineer who commented he’d had a number of car cut his train off over the years. He observed that the train always wins.
@20 Thank you for mentioning the sublime In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade by Ian Watson. Most grateful for you doing so, as it saves me from doing it. An absolutely delightful story full of Ian Watson’s wicked inventiveness. Since it is a short story about British intercity trains travelling between cities in earlier epochs, in this case the Upper Cretaceous, its title should be formatted as “In the Upper Cretaceous with Summerfire Brigade’ because that’s how short story titles are represented and not in italics as that is reserved for monographs (this means books, and ones usually in the form of a single written work, hence monograph). Proper formatting of proper names of things and titles of long and short works of text are one of those things that do grate. The story is one among my many, many favourite Ian Watson short stories. The man wrote so many, many stories that deserve that accolade.
I remember Barbara Feldman interviewing a train engineer who commented he’d had a number of car cut his train off over the years. He observed that the train always wins.
There’s a famous video, probably on Youtube somewhere, of the time the train didn’t win. The obstruction in question was a deliberately derailed nuclear fuel cask, as an experiment and public demonstration of just how safe the casks were (the train was another matter).
I would have thought this wouldn’t have evoked so many responses, but I guess there is a place in science fiction for railroad stories. Here’s a couple more:
In “Dandelion Wine,” which is more nostalgia than science fiction, Ray Bradbury waxed poetically about the beauty and utility of light rail.
In “The Reefs of Space,” Pohl and Williamson described a system of vacuum tubes bored through the Earth’s core, connecting major cities on straight lines, and trains that were more like spaceships zipping through them.
Not quite SF, but definitely very fictional, may I nominate: UK railway timetables.
Sure, it might say that the train to Paddington will arrive at 19:43, but every British traveller knows this to be nothing more than fanciful imagination. Perhaps there will be leaves on the track, or the wrong kind of snow
@34: A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! was published as a standalone novel ( but renamed Tunnel Through The Deeps in the USA, for some unfathomable reason) and is still available in both paper and ebook forms. It’s not exactly a great novel – Harrison was pastiching the Victorian “ripping yarn” style – but It’s a fun read and you learn a bit about caissons. And it’s significant as a pioneer steampunk novel.
@49: Aaronovich’s novella The Furthest Station is also heavily Tube-related, centring on ghostly goings-on at the last station on the Metropolitan Line.
The Bifrost incident is a narrative album by The Mechanisms, concerning an attempt to work out what happened to a train… travelling through a wormhole… while carrying the Norse Gods. There tends to be a lot going on in any Mechanisms Story Album- these are the folks who brought you “An Arthurian Western… set on a space station slowly spiraling into the sun.”
Unless I missed it skimming through the 63 comments, no one has yet mentioned the 2013 Rustblind and Silverbright: A Slipstream Anthology of Railway Stories, containing stories which could be categorized as slipstream, science fiction or horror. Some are well worth reading. There’s a helpful customer’s review on Amazon which has short comments on each story.
@61: As witness the discussion in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday:
The Wrong Track by E.C. Tubb in Science Fantasy 12. A strange story.
There’s also this 2019 anthology from Canada’s EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing: Fantastic Trains (An Anthology of Phantasmagorical Engines and Rail Riders). Some great stories in there.
As a bonus, have a train-focused SFF role playing game (RPG): “Twisted Rails” by MacGuffin & Co. (https://www.macguffinandcompany.com/twisted-rails)
I see folks have mentioned China Miéville’s Railsea but my first thought was his Iron Council — a fantastic book.
and everyone needs to read Ian McDonald’s rollicking Ares Express.
I’m a little surprised that nobody has brought up the Firefly episode, “The Train Job.”
https://firefly.fandom.com/wiki/The_Train_Job
A really impressively huge (but mostly unused) train system can be found in _Heaven’s River_, the 4th Bobiverse book by Dennis E Taylor
Just read The Pretended by Darryl A.Smith in Sheree Thomas’Dark Matter.(no libraries open in Lockdown so reading my older anthologies)Obvious nods to the Holocaust but made me cry for A ROBOT!
Who can forget the opening paragraphs of Heinlein’s Starman Jones?:
Don’t remember Supertrain.
Guess it never made it to the UK
Thank goodness
A city on rails that follows the terminator on Mercury in 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson may or may not be trainish enough, but I liked it. I am currently reading Shadow of the Ship which is also trainish, but it has already been mentioned
Lots of train related activities in Cherryh’s Foreigner series, with surprisingly extensive focus on preserving train service in lieu of seeking even more disruptive technologies. The latest cycle takes place almost entirely in or around trains.
Has anyone mentioned Harry and Rachel Turtledove’s On the Train yet?
Description from Publishers Weekly:
“Turtledoves père and fille offer two stories set on a railroad-girt world. Harry Turtledove (Supervolcano) introduces Javan, a young man from the city of Pingaspor whose third-class ticket allows him to expand his worldview, and whose ambition allows him to make a life for himself in the narrow confines of the Train. Rachel Turtledove’s story describes the first-class travels of nanny Eli, hired by the Baroness Vasri, who becomes entangled in the world of the Directors of the Railroad and the slinkers who stow away. The world of the Train is insular even as it circles the planet, offering only fleeting glimpses into the wonders beyond, whether the ravages of war or the effects more magical regions have on the Train’s mechanism. The original setting and likable characters have a surprising number of possibilities that could easily be explored in future books.”
Cherie Priest’s Dreadnought (part of her Clockwork Century series) has a mega-train and a mega-chase across country in it (with bad guys, solders, and possibly some zombies, if I recall correctly). I’m surprised not to see more steampunk nominees here in general!
@@@@@74/David_O — The scene from Starman Jones that is indelibly marked on my memory is when Max decides to take a shortcut through the maglev tunnel. After all, he knows when the next train is scheduled … and then, about halfway through, he recalls that not all trains operate on a schedule, and he starts to jog forward toward the impossibly distant circle of light ahead, and then runs faster, and faster, and faster ….
In Jack Vance’s Big Planet (1957), the shipwrecked Earthfolk ride the “monoline” — a sort of sail-powered cable car — for a segment of their projected 40,000-mile trip to Earth Enclave, on the opposite side of Big Planet, which really lives up to its name.
Vance had a knack for inventing “primitive” technologies that seem so practical the reader wonders why they were never built.
Nobody’s mentioned Infinity Train yet?
Per Wikipedia: “The series is set on a gigantic, mysterious and seemingly endless train traveling through a barren landscape, whose cars contain a variety of bizarre, fantastical and impossible environments.”
Including a car full of corgis (my favorite!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6kfVWv01k
I love Zahn’s Frank Compton series (which begins with “Night Train to Rigel”). It’s second only to the original Admiral Thrawn trilogy (“Heir to the Empire” et al.).
I would, very happy, read a fanfic that mixed Trainspotting and the Hogwarts Express. Please, somebody write one?
Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John story The Little Black Train involves a train no one is eager to ride.
I heard a voice of warning,
A message from on high,
“Go put your house in order
For thou shalt surely die.
Tell all your friends a long farewell
And get your business right—
The little black train is rolling in
To call for you tonight.”
http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/John%20the%20Balladeer/0671654187___7.htm
There was an unfinished train-based series, “The Iron Angels” with episodes in at least two of the “There Will be War” series of anthologies. Interesting enough that I could wish for more.
There was a major train-based plot arc and a number of train-based scenes in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. SF, if not good SF.
There was a train-based story included in Turtledove’s A Different Flesh, the fix-up in which a smaller-brained hominid species survived into modern times.