In this chapter, the author argues that rail travel both engenders and draws attention to instabilities in female identity, exposing the construction, perhaps even the notions, of fashionability and femininity as fragile and complex. He analyzes the complex and contradictory pressures placed upon Victorian women, who were expected to construct and maintain an impression of respectability and modishness during journeys that were, as contemporary sources attest, often long, uncomfortable, and exhausting. The railway presented the mid-Victorian traveller with a relatively new social situation that was at once confined and anonymous, yet also public and exposed. The experience of train travel becomes a form of panoramic entertainment in its own right that depends upon the compelling disjunction between mundane reality and the fresh, seemingly extraordinary perspective offered by the railway. 'An Expensive Journey' follows the travels of a young woman named Laura Fillingham, who is swindled by a handsome confidence-trickster whom she meets on a railway journey between Retford and Dorsetshire.