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.
