In the 1830s and 1840s, railways were available to relatively few communities, with many encountering them on paper and in public discourse long before they had the opportunity to see them in person. This chapter examines what preceded the slow integration of railway infrastructure into narrative infrastructure: fantastical visions of technomodernity that did not fit well into established plots. Documenting efforts by railway companies, journalists, and cartographers to articulate steam-powered transit exposes how widely authors struggled to find a fitting form for railways on the page. Examples include Charles Dickens’s false starts in weaving railway imagery and mobility into prose, via The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). By changing track to explore the notion of ‘fellow passengers’ in A Christmas Carol (1843), and taking time and space away from writing on the move to develop a more deliberately engineered structure for his 1848 novel, Dombey and Son, Dickens adapts his approach to plotting long-form fiction in the steam age. These readings reveal the importance of carefully laying groundwork – or infrastructure – for large-scale shifts in novel form.