Victor Appleton 3 hr 11 min read

Tom Swift builds an electric locomotive to hurtle two miles a minute down the rails, racing to fulfill a daring contract while sabotage and enemies threaten to derail him.

Victor Appleton's 1922 novel is a rousing entry in the beloved Tom Swift juvenile series. Fast, wholesome, inventive. Read it for a classic boys' invention-adventure, a record-breaking locomotive, a high-stakes trial run, and thwarted villainy, in the brisk, optimistic style that made Tom Swift a fixture of early-twentieth-century American juvenile fiction and a byword for young ingenuity.

In its time

Published in 1922, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

3 hr 11 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).