Edith Nesbit´s ‘The Railway Children’ is one of the best-loved family stories of all the classics and it is a perfect demonstration of why a safety net is so important. ‘The Railway Children’ is a straightforward narrative of what happens when a family is disrupted by the absence of one of its members, and Nesbit uses the disruption to examine the responsibilities that people have to one another and themselves within the English class structure. The book conveys the basic sense that people and the world are largely good; although the children’s father has been wrongfully imprisoned, justice does prevail in the end.
When Roberta, Peter and Phyillis’s father is arrested their life is turned upside down. The children move to the country and the railway that runs nearby becomes their greatest source of adventure. One day, they come up with a brilliant plan to make use of the friends they’ve made through the train to prove their father’s innocence and bring him back safely. Will it work?