"Locomoniac possession," from The New Hyperion, 1875.

"You feel with wonder that you are not doing anything very extraordinary after all."  From A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves by Sara Jeanette Duncan, 1890.

From The Chronicles of a Garden by Henrietta Wilson, 1864.

"Crossing the burning bridge," from The Biography of a Locomotive Engine by Henry Frith and illustrated by P. Hardy, 1891.

"The spectre on the line," from The Biography of a Locomotive Engine by Henry Frith and illustrated by P. Hardy, 1891.

An illustration from Illustrated Penny Tales From the Strand Library (1894).  The caption reads: "It was a terrible position."

Nearly seventy years before Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, we find "Death on the rail" in Mrs. Grundy, 1865.

Thirty-three years before Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries," in which he likened a far-off train to a crawling caterpillar, this caterpillar train appeared in Punch (1865).

An illustration from an 1888 issue of Punch magazine.

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Puck magazine.

Here's a precursor to Thomas the Tank Engine from an 1850 issue of Punch magazine.

"The Down Express":  an illustration from a 1901 issue of The Idler magazine.

An illustration from a 1906 issue of Wide World magazine.  The caption reads: "I walked right off the train."