Andrew Martin, author of The Necropolis Railway, writes in the Guardian of the railway settings that have appeared throughout English literature.
What tickled my fancy was this paragraph about Charles Dickens:
More railway in literature here.
Dickens, like many early Victorians, was horrified by trains: there was "even railway time observed in clocks", he wrote, "as if the sun itself had given in". In Dombey and Son, conceived in the second great railway boom of the 1840s, he has the speculator Carker run down by a "red-eyed", monstrous express, which "licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat". In 1865 Dickens was himself involved in a train crash at Staplehurst, in which 10 people were killed. He continued to travel on trains, although he would grip the arms of the seat, and always felt the carriage was "down" on one side.