Plans for King's Cross Station at its current location were drawn up in 1848, and the station opened with two platforms in 1852. The station acted as the London hub for the Great Northern Railway. Thus, King's Cross worked to decrease the distance between different areas of England as train travel was expanded in London.

As seen in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, the railway was an important mode of transportation. The novel’s hero, Robert Audley, uses the train almost exclusively to travel around the country as he attempts to piece together the life of Lady Audley. Lady Audley traveled quite the distance as she fled from her past and toward a life full of luxury. However, because of the train, this is not the obstacle for Robert that it could have been a century beforehand. Train travel greatly revolutionized the speed of travel across the country, and made it more feasible to journey from one end of England to the other. A journey that would have taken days in the time of stagecoach travel could be accomplished in hours.

Robert Audley mentions whilst setting off on one of his many excursions that he made his way to King’s Cross station. He evidently lived close to the station, since “[w]ithin an hour of the receipt of [a] message [from Clara Talboys], Mr. Audley arrived at King’s-cross station…” (Braddon 770). As Robert was a frequent traveler (partly because of his family’s residence in a different area of England, and partly because of his crusade to find out his nefarious aunt), the King’s Cross station would have been somewhere he visited often. Because it acted as the a major railway hub for London, it turned London into even more of a political and cultural hub, a status that can be seen in the sheer number of Victorian novels that use it as a setting.

The station was also a fairly new addition to London at the time that Braddon published her novel. King’s Cross had only opened ten years prior to Lady Audley’s Secret’s publication. However, it had already seen vast improvements by the time Robert Audley would have been using it. The station remains a symbol of connection across vast distances. Modern travelers can catch a train that takes them around the London area, or one that takes them as far as France (using a tunnel under the English Channel, of course).

Sources: 

"Kings Cross Station" https://www.kingscross.co.uk/kings-cross-station 

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley's Secret. Project Gutenburg ebook. 1862.