What do you think?
Rate this book
Classic Railway Stories
In Victorian England the expansion of railways changed history. Landscapes and cities were transformed and, for the first time, people travelled for miles at unimaginable speeds. It’s no wonder that the golden age of steam travel inspired a rich array of short stories.
Classic Railway Stories is part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
Train travel was disruptive, fast and sometimes perilous – all the ingredients too of a good short story. Strangers and acquaintances are thrown together and missing their stop is also a great plot device. Then there are the perils of travelling alone to somewhere new, possibly in the dark when who knows what crimes and mysteries might unfold.
All these narrative tricks play out in this diverting collection. In Margaret Oliphant’s moving story, a young wife escapes her abusive husband when their train leaves without him. In ‘Holding Up a Train’ O. Henry gives an account of the pros and cons of being a train robber and Saki wittily describes a mother’s attempt to control her unruly children. With crime and mystery from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Maurice le Blanc there’s so much here to entertain.
Classic Railway Stories is part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.
Train travel was disruptive, fast and sometimes perilous – all the ingredients too of a good short story. Strangers and acquaintances are thrown together and missing their stop is also a great plot device. Then there are the perils of travelling alone to somewhere new, possibly in the dark when who knows what crimes and mysteries might unfold.
All these narrative tricks play out in this diverting collection. In Margaret Oliphant’s moving story, a young wife escapes her abusive husband when their train leaves without him. In ‘Holding Up a Train’ O. Henry gives an account of the pros and cons of being a train robber and Saki wittily describes a mother’s attempt to control her unruly children. With crime and mystery from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Maurice le Blanc there’s so much here to entertain.
236 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 8, 2025
3 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Read
July 12, 2025This is a very attractive book. A small format hardback with a pretty dustjacket and endpapers. The selection of fourteen stories, one French, one Canadian, one from the USA, the rest from Britain, mostlyvfrom the nineteenth century felt a bit odd, almost as though their presence here had something to do with being out of copywrite. I was struck that I didn't recognise many of the authors, by the evidence here, they didn't strike me as an impressive bunch.
The first story (Chekhov "a happy man") and the last story (Margaret Oliphant "a story of a wedding tour") both rely on a character getting off their train at a station, and then not getting back on board for different reasons. I liked the Oliphant story best of all from this collection because for me it was closest to being a railway story, by which I mean a story in which the railway is opportunity and possibility that allows a character to invent and shape their life, although in other ways, like the smell of anti-Semitism and the rather conventional Victorian attitudes there nothing to commend the story. The rest of the stories pretty much used the railway as a setting. There is no sense of the railway as changing ways of life, as an agent of change, or evrn a symbol of technology or rationality. Two of the stories were ghost stories, but the authors were not interested in contrasting the supernatural with the mechanical.
A couple in the collection were crime stories, including two by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were all of the locked room mystery type - the author sets up an apparently impossible puzzle like a train disapearing between two stations or a kidnapped schoolboy vanishing from a moving train. The solution to these puzzles were clever though not very satisfactory
One story, "Cuckoo Valley Railway" by Arthur Quiller-Couch had an interesting premise of a small county town in the early days of the railway building a line destructively through a valley not to connevt to anywhere else but simply to bring raw materials in to town. On the line there is only one station, at the other end of the line simply a heap of gravel. It all seemed to scream symbolism, but the author didn't want to develop in that direction or really in any direction at all other than possibly implying that people in remote county towns are just a bit dim and limited, though capable of making cocoa in such a way that itvcan really up set your stomach.
The rest of the stories were all like Little Red Riding Hood - that other person in your carriage isn't who you thought it was - although, thankfully, no grandmothers were eaten.
Overall nice, diverting, friendly stories unless you are a kidnapped schoolboy, or a recently married man thinking to innocently stretch your legs at a station for a few minutes , pleasing easy reading. And there was my second favourite story here: "Holding up a train" by O.Henry, just a delight because of the narrative voice of a train robber explaining why its fun, easy work, that it is really not worth doing.
The first story (Chekhov "a happy man") and the last story (Margaret Oliphant "a story of a wedding tour") both rely on a character getting off their train at a station, and then not getting back on board for different reasons. I liked the Oliphant story best of all from this collection because for me it was closest to being a railway story, by which I mean a story in which the railway is opportunity and possibility that allows a character to invent and shape their life, although in other ways, like the smell of anti-Semitism and the rather conventional Victorian attitudes there nothing to commend the story. The rest of the stories pretty much used the railway as a setting. There is no sense of the railway as changing ways of life, as an agent of change, or evrn a symbol of technology or rationality. Two of the stories were ghost stories, but the authors were not interested in contrasting the supernatural with the mechanical.
A couple in the collection were crime stories, including two by Arthur Conan Doyle. They were all of the locked room mystery type - the author sets up an apparently impossible puzzle like a train disapearing between two stations or a kidnapped schoolboy vanishing from a moving train. The solution to these puzzles were clever though not very satisfactory
One story, "Cuckoo Valley Railway" by Arthur Quiller-Couch had an interesting premise of a small county town in the early days of the railway building a line destructively through a valley not to connevt to anywhere else but simply to bring raw materials in to town. On the line there is only one station, at the other end of the line simply a heap of gravel. It all seemed to scream symbolism, but the author didn't want to develop in that direction or really in any direction at all other than possibly implying that people in remote county towns are just a bit dim and limited, though capable of making cocoa in such a way that itvcan really up set your stomach.
The rest of the stories were all like Little Red Riding Hood - that other person in your carriage isn't who you thought it was - although, thankfully, no grandmothers were eaten.
Overall nice, diverting, friendly stories unless you are a kidnapped schoolboy, or a recently married man thinking to innocently stretch your legs at a station for a few minutes , pleasing easy reading. And there was my second favourite story here: "Holding up a train" by O.Henry, just a delight because of the narrative voice of a train robber explaining why its fun, easy work, that it is really not worth doing.
August 8, 2025
What a joyful companion this book has been over the last few weeks! Joyful because I love the Macmillan Collector’s format not just small enough to carry wherever you go but also so elegant with its cloth binding, gilt edges and ribbon marker. Appropriate because I found “Classic Railway Stories” in the big Feltrinelli bookstore at Naples Central, crazy busy with hordes of tourists, before boarding Italian railways’ pride and joy frecciarossa train bound for Turin. The short stories from Chekhov to Arthur Conan Doyle, Maurice Leblanc and Margaret Oliphant covered everything from crime stories to poignant tales of unhappy marriages and frustrated love. I wouldn’t say these stories represented the best of their author’s abilities, but they took me back to that turn of the 19thC golden age of rail and steam that had a profound effect on society and industry. So different from now with our expensive, crowded trains. And guess what? Our frecciarossa broke down between Rome and Florence!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews