Underground Railroad

Maybe you've been Blessed with Suck. Or maybe you were simply Made a Slave or found yourself Trapped Behind Enemy Lines. You Can Run but You Can't Hide. Unless these folks help you. A Sub-Trope of La Résistance, the Underground Railroad is the group of people who work in secret to help you escape to freedom. Usually it is not actually underground, or even necessarily a railroad, though there is no particular reason it couldn't be.

For modern American Superhero stories, the famous slave escape network is the perfect way to show the heroes comes from an honored history of heroism as they learn they have ancestors who risked everything joining the organization, and also left secret passages and hideouts to use now.

Examples of Underground Railroad include:

Comic Books

• In Batman comics, Solomon Wayne was part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, hiding escaped slaves in that big cave under Wayne Manor (this comes up in The Dark Knight Trilogy).
• In Superman, The Kents, Pa and Clark Kent learn that they had heroic ancestors who were heroic abolitionists who at least gave Harriet Tubman a hand with the Underground Railroad.

Film

• The Philadelphia Experiment II. The American Underground has a route to help Americans (who are basically slaves of the Nazis) escape to safety in Alaska, which is apparently not under the Nazis' control.
• In One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the networks of dogs and other animals who help the dalmatians escape Cruella.

Literature

• In The Handmaid's Tale, there was an underground railroad for getting people (mostly women, IIRC) from Gilead to Canada.
• Number the Stars is a work of historical fiction set during World War II, about the Real Life efforts by Danes in Nazi occupied Denmark to smuggle Jews into neutral Sweden.
• In Jo Walton's Small Change trilogy, several groups focus on getting Jews and other undesirables out of fascist Europe. When Carmichael is blackmailed into becoming the head of The Watch, a British gestapo, he and a few trustworthy allies found the Inner Watch and use their resources and feared reputation to secretly get innocents to safety.
• One is developed in the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series to help Jedi evade the various invaders, sympathizers, and bounty hunters who want to capture them. The "Great River" is later converted into a branch of the Insiders and later the Ryn Network, which both have a more active intelligence role.

Live Action TV

• Babylon 5: There is a so-called Telepath Underground Railroad, which helps telepaths escape from the Psi-Corps. From time to time, the Psi-Cops, elite Psi-Corps agents who are also powerful telepaths, will attempt to break the Railroad in order to capture the rogue telepaths.
  • Later on, other operations develop to help Narn civilians escape captivity after their star nation falls under a brutal occupation by The Centauri Republic. One of the notables in this movement is Vir Cotto, using his credentials as Londo's aide and later Ambassador to Minbar under the name "Abrahamo Lincolni".
  • And the Telepath Underground Railroad is used again later on as a recruiting network for telepaths to help the Army of Light fight the Shadows.
• In Firefly and Serenity, Simon was helped in his rescue of his sister from a government lab by some unspecified co-conspirators who apparently are these.
• In Hogan's Heroes, the title characters and the French Resistance helped escaping Allied P.O.W.s reach England.
• Murder, She Wrote: Investigating a murder attributed to the slave of a distant relative, Mrs. Fletcher found that the victim was a "Station Master" on the Underground Railroad, and was murdered by his father-in-law.
• Quantum Leap: In "The Leap Between the States" Sam leaps into his own great-grandfather, a Union officer in the American Civil War, and comes across a southern belle and her seemingly devoted slave who are secretly helping other slaves escape north.

Tabletop RPG

• Shadowrun supplement Aztlan. The Aztlan Freedom League helps refugees from Aztlan escape to the Confederated American States.
• Fantasy Games Unlimited's Psi World adventure Underground Railroad. The Free State operates, with the aid of a psionic underground in the Confederacy, a series of escape routes for psis who wish to get out of the repressive police state of the Confederacy.

Video Games

• Half-Life 2: Black Mesa East ran a network of safehouses and supply caches to help people escape City 17, with the help of resistance agents planted in Civil Protection. When the manhunt for Gordon Freeman is set off, much of the network ends up being broken by the Combine, although the resistance group that was running the network manages to survive and fight on.
• Morrowind has The Twin Lamps, who help free slaves and get them to safety (as well as occasionally killing their masters). Considering that slavery is a thriving business in Morrowind, they are kept very busy.
• Fallout 3 took the Underground Railroad and ran with it in one of the sidequests, essentially by combining it with the plot of Blade Runner and having the Lone Wanderer either assist in protecting an escaped android, or helping capture him and return him to his creators in Canada.
• Dragon Age II - In a game built around the Fantastic Racism mages in Kirkwall deal with, the presence of a "Mage Underground" should come as no surprise. By act 3, the increasingly-paranoid Meredith has basically dismantled it, which doesn't do much for Anders' mental state.

Real Life

• The Trope Namer is the Underground Railroad that existed in the United States before the American Civil War, which helped escaped slaves make their way north to safety. Some found refuge in the Northern states that were anti-slavery, but some ended up fleeing all the way to Canada to avoid slave extradition laws that required escaped slaves to be arrested and returned to their owners.
• During World War II, airmen from the Allied Powers who were shot down over Occupied Europe would often find themselves being hidden and protected by members of various resistance groups, who would try to smuggle them back to England or to a neutral country such as Switzerland or Sweden.
  • Counter-intuitively, the easiest path back to England was not across the English Channel, but rather a lengthy and difficult trip through Occupied France, Vichy France, and neutral Spain to the Mediterranean, due to the density of German defenses and patrols along the French coastline.