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As the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth, perhaps nothing captured the spirit of American enterprise so well as the thunder of trains across the continent. As dominant in the popular imagination as it was in daily life, the railroad also enjoyed particular favor among fiction writers; for a time, fictional renderings of life on the rails were plentiful and varied. But as the twentieth century progressed and the railroad lost its status, railroad fiction all but faded away. Today, it is hard to recapture the feelings that train travel once produced, or the details of its reign. In this regard, rail fiction constitutes an invaluable resource. In many cases written by those who actually worked on the railroad, these stories provide realism and a level of technical authenticity not readily available elsewhere. This extensively annotated bibliography lists and discusses works from the 1840s to the 21st century. It provides detailed entries on 956 works of fiction, including both novels and short stories, either devoted entirely to the railroad or containing significant and notable passages about it. Each entry includes plot and character descriptions with a view to allowing the reader to make an informed decision on the source’s merit. A detailed introduction discusses the history of railroad fiction and highlights common themes such as strikes, innovations, hoboes and rail heroes. Leading writers of railroad fiction Harry Bedwell, Frank Packard and Cy Warman are well represented along with writers of wider scope such Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe. An appendix organizes entries by decade of publication, and the work is indexed by subject and title.
