English · Beginner
Read The Railway Children in Englishwith every sentence explained
E. Nesbit · 1906
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit was first published in 1906. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 59,100 words.
A father taken away in the night. A new life in the country. A railway line full of adventures.
Roberta, Peter and Phyllis have a comfortable, happy life in London, until the evening two strange men come to see their father and he disappears. No one will tell the children where he has gone. Suddenly poor, they move with their mother to a small cottage called Three Chimneys, beside a railway line in the countryside.
The railway becomes their whole world. Every morning they wave at the 9.15 train and an old gentleman who always waves back. They make friends with Perks the porter, have brave adventures on the tracks, and quietly try to help their mother, who writes stories late into the night to pay the bills.
Gentle, funny and deeply moving, this 1906 classic has been loved for generations and is famous for its much-loved film.
- Author
- E. Nesbit
- First published
- 1906
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children
- Length
- About 59,100 words
How it opens
They were not railway children to begin with. I don't suppose they had ever thought about railways except as a means of getting to Maskelyne and Cook's, the Pantomime, Zoological Gardens, and Madame Tussaud's. They were just ordinary suburban children, and they lived with their Father and Mother in an ordinary red-brick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bath-room with hot and cold water, electric bells, French windows, and a good deal of white paint, and 'every modern convenience', as the house-agents say.
Reading The Railway Children in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
