Venturing beyond Britain’s established railway lines, this chapter investigates fictional entanglements with late-nineteenth-century ambitions to build a railway tunnel between England and France. It explores debates surrounding the proposed Channel Railway (1880–82), showing how fiction exacerbated fears about what (other than trains, passengers, and freight) such a line might carry. Thomas Hardy’s 1881 novel A Laodicean depictstransport and communications infrastructures enabling and impeding cross-Channel understanding. By linking A Laodicean to the Channel railway debates, this chapter reveals the political stakes of connection in a text that has attracted critical attention for its treatment of telegraphy and the postal service. Hardy’s rich railway soundscape of subterranean rumblings and distant disturbances taps into late nineteenth-century preoccupations with the reverberative qualities of industrial architecture. A by-product of the machine ensemble, reverberation could be both heard and felt. In this chapter, reverberation becomes evidence of the leakiness of a supposedly rational system, and with errant sounds working against the railway’s vector-like ideal.