The mythology of the Train, the Railroad, those two shiny tracks running off into the far distance is a powerful symbol of the industrial age.

The train was the first mass transit system to network the land and to carry people and materials of every class and of every shape. A sort of democracy with the only requirement of use being the price of a ticket.

Poets who grew up with this pulsating leviathan of industry were quick to see its merits for their own lines and verse.

Across these poems comes both an individual eye across a wide range of feelings, thoughts and ideas as well as, occasionally, the trainspotter's delight for form and detail from poets such as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Edna St Vincent Millay, Damon Runyon and a host of others.

1 - The Poetry of Trains - An Introduction

2 - A Song of the Rails by Damon Runyon

3 - Song of a Train by John Davidson

4 - Song of the Rail by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

5 - Rhyme of the Rail by John Godfrey Saxe

6 - Up the Line by Will Carleton

7 - From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

8 - An Incident in a Railroad Car by Jamers Russell Lowell

9 - Railway Times by Martin Faraquar Tupper

10 - On the Engine by Night by Alexander Anderson

11 - The Night Journey by Rupert Brooke

12 - Travel by Edna St Vincent Millay

13 - Train Ride by Federico Garcia Lorca

14 - The Train by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

15 - Homeward Ho! by Ada A Mosher

16 - The Rail Road by James Very

17 - The Railway Train by Emily Dickinson

18 - In the Train by James Thomson

19 - The Division Superintendent by Ambrose Bierce

20 - The Word of an Engineer by James Weldon Johnson

21 - The Train Among the Hills by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

22 - The Gospel Train. Transcribed by Christine Rutledge of the Carolina Singers 1873

23 - The Jaffa and Jerusalem Railway by Eugene Field

24 - In the Train and At Versailles by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

25 - The Ledbury Train by Radclyffe Hall

26 - Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

27 - The Ancient Arteries of America by Daniel Sheehan

28 - Subway Wind by Claude McKay

29 - In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

30 - Railway Rhymes by C L Graves

31 - What's the Railroad to Me by Henry David Thoreau

32 - The Railway Station by Archibald Lampman

33 - Thompson's Lunch Room, Grand Central Station by Amy Lowell

34 - Faintheart in a Railway Train by Thomas Hardy

35 - Song O' the Lost Trains by Damon Runyon

36 - The Phantom Train by Tom Hood

37 - One of the Unfair Sex by Ambrose Bierce

38 - September 1st. 1802 by William Wordsworth

39 - Autumn in the Garden by Fredegond Shove

40 - A Winter Day - Noon and Afternoon by Thomas Aird

41 - In the Train by Sara Teasdale

42 - To a Locomotive in Winter by Walt Whitman

43 - On the Departure Platform by Thomas Hardy

44 - Guild Signal by Bret Harte

45 - The Send Off by Wilfred Owen