Railway infrastructure defines the narrative parameters of two texts by Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South and ‘Cousin Phillis’. Focusing on small-scale interim stations, and the construction of new lines, this chapter examineslogistical options that even dormant railway infrastructure can bring to stories otherwise concerned with being-in-place. This infrastructural reading of North and South focuses on a scene set at Outwood Station, a small but well-connected hinge between North and South. It shows that proximity to physically iterated railway infrastructure reconnects the narrative to a broad system of global exchange and mobility. In ‘Cousin Phillis’, meanwhile, Gaskell’s civil engineer narrator lays both railway lines and plot lines but neither quite coheres into a functioning, connective system. This chapter traces the uneven degrees of narrative integration in Gaskell’s works back to their differing publication intervals, with North and South’s weekly serialisation providing far greater opportunity to situate its local plot within global circulation than the monthly release of ‘Cousin Phillis’.