Mugby Junction

Dickens penned a majority of the issue, including the frame narrative in which "the Gentleman for Nowhere," who has spent his life cloistered in the firm Barbox Brothers & Co., makes use of his new-found freedom in retirement to explore the rail lines that connect with Mugby Junction.

Mugby Junction includes the famous ghost story "The Signal-Man" concerning a spectre seen beside a tunnel entrance.

The signalman's work is at a signalbox in a deep cutting near a tunnel entrance on a lonely stretch of the line, and he controls the movements of passing trains.

Dickens may have based this incident on the Clayton Tunnel rail crash that occurred in 1861, five years before he wrote the story.

While waiting for his journey to resume, he went into the refreshment room for a cup of coffee, and the proprietess, clearly not recognising the celebrity author, treated him rudely.