The Railway (Russian: Железная дорога) is one of the more famous novels by Hamid Ismailov.

The book was originally written before he left Uzbekistan and was translated into English by Robert Chandler and published in 2006.

[1] The novel is plotted in Gilas, a fictitious small town on the ancient Silk Route in Uzbekistan.

Gilas has people from all over - Armenians, Kurds, Persians, Ukrainians, Jews, Chechens, Koreans, gypsies, Russians etc and the novel tells the stories of some of them.

The book describes the dramatic changes that was felt in the Central Asia in early twentieth century.