13 Train Horror Book Recommendations
There’s a feeling of being out of control when you’re travelling by train.
It’s different to a car, where you can just pull over and stop whenever you want.
On a train, you can get up and walk around. You can eat. You can read. You can sleep, but do you dare?
Who are all these strangers sharing your journey?
What have they brought on board?
What’s hidden in the depths of the train and is it really taking you where you want to go?
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Table of Contents
The Platform Edge – The British Library
Train horror anthology
In this express service to the unknown, phantom passengers join the jostling of the daily commute, a subway car disappears into another dimension without a trace, while a tragic derailment on a lonely hillside in the Alps torments the locals with its horrifying nightly repetition.
From the open railways of Europe and America to the pressing dark of the London Underground, The Platform Edge is the perfect traveling companion for unforgettable journeys into the supernatural.
“… there was something wrong about Number 651 even before she was finished building.”
Hell Train - Iain Rob Wright
Supernatural train horror
Clip and Xavi are youngsters in love, with their whole lives ahead of them. Clip, a psychology student, and Xavi, a med student are catching the train into the university for an afternoon lecture. But today, they aren’t going to make their destination.
Shortly upon entering a short tunnel, the world stops making sense, and the future suddenly seems short. There are dangers on the train, least of all the other passengers, and for some reason the lights keep going out.
Strangest of all, the train should have left the short tunnel several minutes ago. It’s almost like the tunnel goes on forever. And ever. And ever.
“Pay attention to the tunnel up ahead. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a work of art.”
Vampire on the Orient Express - Shane Carrow
Vampire train horror
Paris, 1914. American adventurer Sam Carter boards the Orient Express, departing France in style after an impulsive decision to desert the Foreign Legion.
British diplomat Lucas Avery is already nursing a drink in the smoking car, resenting his assignment to the distant Ottoman Empire.
Neither man expects anything more from the next three days and three thousand miles than rich food, expensive champagne and fine cigars.
But something dangerous is lurking aboard the train, hiding in plain sight among French aristocrats and German businessmen.
Through fire and darkness, through blood and ice, the Orient Express is bearing an ancient evil across the continent, and not all its passengers will live to see Constantinople.
“Deep within those carriages, hidden away in the darkness, something ancient stirred.”
Ghost Train - Stephen Laws
Supernatural train horror
Mark Davies has no memory of what happened when he fell from the King’s Cross train. But ever since the accident he has been haunted by terrifying nightmares, and he feels compelled to return again and again to the station.
Yet Mark is not alone. Over the span of decades, many strange and violent incidents have occurred on the King’s Cross line. Unexplained acts of brutality. Random acts of violence. An unseen force that drives people to kill.
There is something evil aboard the train. And to stop it Mark must take one final train ride, right through the gates of Hell.
“He had hoped beyond hope that it would not happen again. But it had happened again.”
Ghost Train of Treblinka - Hubert L. Mullins
Supernatural train horror
In the winter of 1943, a train from Warsaw bound for the Treblinka death camp went missing.
Now, in modern day Poland, the train still haunts the countryside, luring people to leave their homes and step aboard.
A group of American travelers with a penchant for ghost hunting decide to look into the disappearances, only to discover a plot that could change the world, and that the Ghost Train’s origins reach much further back than the Holocaust.
“The Entity hadn’t been awake for long, but the old ways returned to him rather quickly.”
The Light at the End - John Skipp & Craig Spector
Supernatural train horror
The newspapers scream out headlines that spark terror across the city. Ten murders on the New York City subway. Ten grisly crimes that defy all reason – no pattern, no M.O., no leads for police to pursue.
The press dubs the fiend the “Subway Psycho”; the NYPD desperately seeks their quarry before the city erupts in mass hysteria.
But they won’t find what they’re looking for. Because they all think that the killer is human. Only a few know the true story – a story the papers will never print.
It is a tale of abject terror and death written in grit and steel and blood. The tale of a man who vanished into the bowels of the urban earth one night, taken by a creature of unholy evil, then left as a babe abandoned on the doorstep of Hell.
Now he is back, driven by twin demons of rage and retribution. He is unstoppable.
And we are all his prey, unless a ragtag band of misfit souls will dare to descend into a world of man-made darkness, where the real and unreal alike dwell in endless shadow.
A place where humanity has been left behind, and the horrifying truth will dawn as a madman’s chilling vendetta comes to light.
“When all the lights went out, Peggy Lewin was alone in the third car.”
Hell Train: All Aboard - Kal Spriggs
Zombie apocalypse train horror
A single train carries what might be the last vestige of civilization through a hellish nightmare.
US Army Captain Jack Zamora is responsible for their safety, a self-imposed burden that wears on him every day. Fighting off living corpses protecting the survivors, keeping the train running and supplied as his team desperately plans their next moves.
Ahead looms the city of St. Louis, the only remaining crossing point of the Mississippi, with three million possessed corpses, a well-armed group of fanatics, and their leader, a religious madman who wants to offer humanity’s survivors up as sacrifices to his new god.
“The possessed didn’t move out of the way as two thousand, nine hundred and fifty tons of steel rolled into them.”
The Waiting Room - F.G. Cottam
Supernatural train station horror
Martin Stride is a retired rock star, enjoying the quiet life with his young family on their beautiful estate.
On the edge of his grounds lies a derelict Edwardian railway station waiting room once used to transport troops in The Great War. Silent for many years, it has become a playground for Martin’s children but now they won’t go near it.
Strange occurrences in the waiting room lead Martin to seek the help of TV’s favourite ghost-hunter Julian Creed.
But Creed’s psychic ability is a fabrication to gain viewers. He doesn’t believe in the paranormal. Until he spends a night in The Waiting Room.
“All that remained amid this verdant eruption was a crumbling island platform and on that, a derelict waiting room.”
The Burning - Bentley Little
Supernatural train horror
A college freshman finds herself stranded in Arizona with no place to stay and nowhere to run.
Cabin fever closes in on an isolated park ranger, as two sinister beauties lurk in the desert outside his door.
A California divorcee is starting a promising new life. But her young son knows better, because he’s seen what’s creeping outside the window.
A cross-country traveler is on a journey of self-discovery. But one tourist trap holds its own dreadful surprises.
Four strangers with one thing in common: a mysterious train choking the sky with black smoke, charging trackless across the American night, and carrying an unstoppable evil, raised from the bowels of history, that will bring their worst fears to life.
“The Man from the Government stood at the edge of the windswept plain and stared out at the carnage before him.”
End of the Line - Jonathan Oliver (editor)
Train horror anthology
In deep tunnels something stirs, borne on a warm breath of wind, reeking of diesel and blood. The spaces between stations hold secrets too terrible for the upper world to comprehend and the steel lines sing with the songs of the dead.
Jonathan Oliver has collected together some of the very best in new horror writing in an themed anthology of stories set on, and around, the New York subway, the London underground, the Metro and other places deep below.
The Majestic 311 - Keith C. Blackmore
Western train horror
Seven train robbers. One haunted locomotive. All aboard for terror.
In the spring of 1903, locomotive 311, known as the Majestic, carried more than one hundred passengers toward a tunnel through the underbelly of the Canadian Rockies. But then the mouth of the tunnel swallowed the 311 whole, and the train, and everyone on it, was never seen again.
Seven years later, a gang of cattle thieves and cutthroats wait on horseback for a train car full of railway cash, a payroll they intend to steal.
What they will discover, however, is that the approaching train isn’t the 5409. It’s the missing 311, a train only whispered about around dying campfires.
A train that some believe still rides the iron rails, traveling to places no mortal should ever go, seeing things no one should ever see.
“Floating through the mountains like the voice of a lonesome ghost. A train whistle.”
Night Train - David Quantick
Supernatural train horror
A woman wakes up, frightened and alone. The room shaking and jumping like it’s alive. The noise is terrifying. Where is she?
Stumbling through a door, she realizes she is on a train carriage. A carriage full of the dead. A personal hell unfolding in an apocalyptic future.
As she makes her way through the train trying to find out what happened to her, she meets a former strongman, a trained killer, and a collection of strange and terrifying creatures. Each step takes her closer to finding out the secret of the Night Train.
“Night. Blackness, anyway. Darkness. No light. Nothing. Just night.”
Hell Train - Christopher Fowler
Supernatural train horror
Imagine there was a classic supernatural chiller that Hammer Films never made. A grand epic produced at the studio’s peak, which played like a cross between the Dracula and Frankenstein films and Dr Terror’s House Of Horrors…
Four passengers meet on a train journey through Eastern Europe during the First World War, and face a mystery that must be solved if they are to survive.
As the Arkangel races through the war-torn countryside, they must find out: What is in the casket that everyone is so afraid of? What is the tragic secret of the veiled Red Countess who travels with them? Why is their fellow passenger the army brigadier so feared by his own men? And what exactly is the devilish secret of the Arkangel itself?
Bizarre creatures, satanic rites, terrified passengers and the romance of travelling by train, all in a classically styled horror novel.
“It looked like a house from a horror film, and it was.”
Published: 15 June 2025
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