This often quite loosely connected series of short stories appeared in the Christmas 1866 edition of All The Year Round, a magazine that Dickens was then editing, while also supplying much of the content, though four stories here are by other, less well known authors. The collection is set around the railways of the fictional town of Mugby where the narrator of the loose overarching framework finds himself in the middle of the night. By far the most famous of these stories is the haunting and much anthologised The Signalmen, the second most famous Dickens ghost story. The Boy at Mugby is Dickens's hilarious satire of the catering in a British train station cafe of the time - complaints about railway food are nothing new! Most of the contributions by other authors are also pretty good, some mystery, with a few gothic twists. Overall, a very good collection. ( )

This is a really interesting little book. Written as a series of 8 short stories, it begins when a man stops at an obscure junction station in the Midlands in the middle of a dark stormy night. The junction has 7 lines that leave it, heading in different directions. The idea is fairly simple, there is a story about what happenes down each of the lines. It doesn't quite work out like that, in that only one of the stories actually takes place on a voyage down one of these lines. The stories become journeys into the human psyche rather than through English geography. Written by Dickens and 4 different writers, the stories are a bit patchy, if I'm honest. That doesn't mean it's not without interest though. The story of the Signalman is a very quite scary ghost story - not at all in the usual line of Dickens. In all of them the railway runs as a theme, the characters all work on, in and with the railways. That makes the things hang together, but I did feel it would have benefitted from a final rounding story to match the initial opener.
As with any short story collection, there are peaks and troughs, but this went very well with a day spent travelling by train. ( )