Read The Railway Children in English — and understand every line.
Read “The Railway Children” by E. Nesbit in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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DICTIONARY
TRANSLATION
apreciar, atesorar
to feel warm affection for; to hold something dear.
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The opening
How “The Railway Children” begins
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 redbrick-fronted villa, with coloured glass in the front door, a tiled passage that was called a hall, a bathroom 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.
Public domain — the whole book is yours to read in the app.
Vocabulary
Words to know before you start
The 30 words you will meet most often in “The Railway Children” at level B1 and above, with how many times each one appears.
- gentleman
- master
- coal
- tunnel
- railway
- wave
- ought
- kind
- chimney
- candle
- canal
- indeed
- wonder
- silly
- glad
- whisper
- heap
- bun
- rose
- darling
- flag
- awfully
- handkerchief
- lean
- breath
- proper
- afterwards
- presently
- firmly
- brave
The meanings here are the everyday ones. In the reader, tap a word to see the sense this sentence uses.
Grammar
Grammar you will meet in “The Railway Children”
How much of each kind of grammar “The Railway Children” uses, counted in the sentences the Reader marks: per 10,000 words, compared with the other books in the library.
- Perfect tenses
- Relative clauses
- Passive voice
- Modal verbs
- Phrasal verbs
- -ing forms and to-infinitives
- Reported speech
- Conditionals
Constructions to look for
- Phrasal verb with on/off It’s a nice clean fracture, and it’ll go on all right, I’ve no doubt.
- Past perfect active “Hum,” said Father, when he had looked the engine over very carefully.
- Relative clauses with where But Bobbie only said, “Come upstairs, come up where nobody can hear us.
Counted the way the Reader shows it: one card per construction in a sentence. Open the book in the Reader and tap a highlighted phrase to see the rule.
Library
What you get while you read
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Tap to translate
Tap any word to see what it means in this exact sentence — with pronunciation and a clear example.
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Save what matters
Add a word and it comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule timed to how memory actually works.
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Grammar in context
Notable structures light up in the text, with a short explanation tied to the sentence you're reading.
About the book
Why The Railway Children is a great book to read in English
On LangOrbit you read “The Railway Children” with a safety net: the translation is one tap away when a sentence runs long, every word opens its meaning in context and can be saved for spaced-repetition review, and the grammar behind the trickier lines is explained right where you meet it.
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The Railway Children
Read “The Railway Children” by E. Nesbit in English. Tap any word for its meaning, hear how it sounds, and save it to a memory-driven review schedule.
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