The Railway Children

by E. Nesbit

Category: Children's Literature

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"The Railway Children" by E. Nesbit is a children's book published in 1906. When their father is suddenly imprisoned for espionage, three siblings—Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis—move with their mother from London to a modest house near a railway. There, they befriend an elderly gentleman on the morning train and encounter various adventures involving Russian exiles, injured travelers, and railway workers. The children must navigate their changed circumstances while holding onto hope that their father's name will be cleared. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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Produced by Les Bowler

THE RAILWAY CHILDREN

By E. Nesbit

To my dear son Paul Bland, behind whose knowledge of railways my ignorance confidently shelters.

Contents.

Chapter I. The beginning of things.

They were not railway children to begin with. I don't suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook's, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bath-room with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and 'e

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About This Edition

This edition of The Railway Children by E. Nesbit is catalogued on Libreya under Children's Literature and runs approximately 59,304 words — about 297 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.

About Classic Children's Literature

The greatest works written for children are not lesser literature — they are a distinct literary achievement, requiring unusual economy of language, imaginative vividness, and an ability to speak truthfully to readers who have not yet learned to accept the compromises that adults make with reality. The classics of children's literature in the public domain represent the founding works of the genre: Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which invented literary nonsense and remains one of the most philosophically rich books in the English language; J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which made the refusal to grow up into a genuine tragic theme; L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which created an entire American mythological landscape; and dozens of others that have shaped the imaginative lives of readers across generations. These books work on multiple levels simultaneously — they delight children with vivid characters and fast-moving plots while offering adults something richer and stranger on re-reading. That capacity to mean different things at different ages is the hallmark of the truly enduring work.