Did The Underground Railroad Actually Have Trains?

Amazon’s The Underground Railroad is a haunting look at one slave’s long road to freedom. Cora (Thuso Mbedu) escapes her awful life on a Georgia plantation by riding a literal Underground Railroad to South Carolina, then North Carolina, and beyond. She eventually arrives in a literal station via a glorious coach, complete with all the accoutrements of fancy train travel. It’s a mesmerizing and romantic interpretation of the Underground Railroad, but is it real? Was the Underground Railroad of history truly a subterranean train line or is The Underground Railroad fudging facts? Did the Underground Railroad actually have trains?

The Underground Railroad is based on the best-selling novel by acclaimed author Colson Whitehead. Director Barry Jenkins adapts the lean 300 page novel into an epic ten part miniseries. He also grounds Cora’s story in familiar-enough territory to make everything that happens feel like historic fiction, if not outright documentary. However there are a lot of historic inaccuracies in Amazon’s The Underground Railroad, starting with that iconic train line.

So what is the real story behind The Underground Railroad? And did the real historic Underground Railroad really have trains?

The Underground Railroad on Amazon: Did the Real Underground Railroad Actually Have Trains?

Nope!

Despite its name, the Underground Railroad wasn’t a railroad in the way Amtrak or commuter rail is. It wasn’t even a real railroad. It was a metaphoric one, where “conductors,” that is basically escaped slaves and intrepid abolitionists, would lead runaway slaves from one “station,” or save house to the next. The Underground Railroad of history was simply a loose network of safe houses and top secret routes to states where slavery was banned.

At its peak, historians estimate about 1000 slaves escaped via the Underground Railroad per year. The service’s most famous conductor? Harriet Tubman, who bravely lead multiple groups to freedom after she herself had escaped.

So yeah, everything about the “real” Underground Railroad in The Underground Railroad is false. In fact, the first underground train — the London Underground, or Tube — wasn’t built until 1863. That’s not only well into the timeline of America’s own Civil War, but in a nation an ocean away from Cora.

Why make up an Underground Railroad with trains for The Underground Railroad? And what else is false? Well, because Cora’s story is a work of fiction in the magical realism genre…

Why Did Amazon’s The Underground Railroad Lie About Trains in the Real Underground Railroad?

Well, is it technically a “lie” if the show is fiction?

Okay, hear me out: both Colson Whitehead’s novel and Barry Jenkins’s limited series start out rooted in the historic horror of slavery. However, Whitehead imagined what could have been if the Underground Railroad was real. He used a literary tool called magical realism to build a world that was very like our own, but with stark, metaphoric differences.

When Cora and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) arrive in South Carolina, they are greeted by what appears to be an abolitionist utopia. There’s a skyscraper decades before one existed and a community that wants to “uplift” Black minds. However it’s soon apparent that the white people South Carolina are actually trying to eradicate Black culture by sterilizing the women and performing secret medical tests on the men. The tests evoke the Tuskegee experiments of the 1940s. The overall concern to make Black people behave “more white”? A form of racism in and of itself.

The episode is as speculative as the idea of a real Underground Railroad. As is the idea of a North Carolina that bans Black people and treats hunting them down as some sort of pseudo-religious event.

The Underground Railroad is a monumental work of speculative fiction. Like other stories the show references — Homer’s The Odyssey and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels — it reveals something inherently true about human nature by plunging audiences into a fictional journey to made up societies.

Where Amazon’s The Underground Railroad gets confusing, though, is in the fact that Jenkins is a filmmaker who roots his storytelling in realism. He makes this fantastic Underground Railroad feel real. However, The Underground Railroad is not a work of historic fiction, but speculative.

Where to stream The Underground Railroad