A small gnome with a grey beard and a pointed hat stands at the entrance of a cave at a high altitude.

At the foot of a hill, the silhouette of a railway train passes by and pours out grey smoke from the locomotive.

In 2008, the art historian Florian Illies made a comparison to J. M. W. Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), "modernity's break-in into art history", and interpreted Gnome Watching Railway Train as Spitzweg's self-ironic comment to his reputation as someone who wanted to stop time.

[1] Analysing the painting in 2018, the German studies scholar Theodore Ziolkowski grouped it with Charles Dickens' novel Dombey and Son (1848), William Wordsworth's poem "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway" (1844) and several texts by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.

Spitzweg's composition, with an elevated figure gazing across a landscape, had previously been used by romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable and Eugène Delacroix.