How did the novel come to be entangled with large-scale public infrastructure in nineteenth-century Britain? Sixteen years after the first purpose-built passenger railway opened in 1830, an anonymous writer for Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal pondered the formal compatibility of railways and fiction. ‘One half of the romantic stories of the country are more or less connected with stage-coach travelling’, the author muses, ‘but the railway, with its formal lines and prosaic punctuality, appears to be almost entirely given up to business’.1 By claiming (however hyperbolically) that ‘one half’ of ‘romantic’ stories in the 1840s work through stagecoach infrastructure, this author puts the untapped potential of railway travel under the spotlight. Yet the exact proportion of fictional references to popular transport is less important than public perception of plotlines and travel as closely intertwined modes. There was an inevitability about novelists exploring the possibilities of passenger railways in fiction.

Fictional junctions developed in parallel complexity to passenger junctions on the rails in the 1860s and 1870s as multiplot novels expanded into series. Chapter 3 examines Dickens’s co-authored collection, Mugby Junction (1866), and Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1864–1879), alongside traffic management systems operating on railways of the period. This chapter provides a cohesive reading of Mugby Junction, a collection whose significance to railway culture is usually determined with reference only to Dickens’s contributions. The chapter examines how form complements content in Mugby Junction, as each short story in the collection examines a different branch or main line. Anthony Trollope, by contrast, offers relatively little direct contemplation of the railway aside from a memorable scene set at Tenway Junction, but he uses railway logistics to manage his plot lines. What emerges from this long-form multiplot work is Trollope’s tendency to re-run certain narrative configurations over the course of the series (love triangles, politics, finance), with very minor adjustments. Through this, we can begin to understand how even the most apparently rigid systems change over time.