"The Celestial Railroad" is short story by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the allegorical tale, Hawthorne adopts the style and content of the seventeenth-century allegory The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Where Bunyan's tale portrays a Christian's spiritual "journey" through life, Hawthorne's satirizes many contemporary religious practices and philosophies, including transcendentalism. Source: Wikipedia (en)