How many seasons and episodes of Hell on Wheels are there? The full count
A complete accounting of Hell on Wheels for anyone sizing up the watch: how many seasons and episodes AMC's railroad Western ran, the exact dates for each stretch, and the scheduling quirk that spread its final season across two calendar years.
Hell on Wheels ran for 5 seasons and 57 episodes on AMC, from November 6, 2011, to July 23, 2016. Episodes run 40 to 50 minutes, which puts the complete series at roughly 41 hours — a manageable commitment by prestige-Western standards.
Season by season
- Season 1 — 10 episodes — November 6, 2011 to January 15, 2012. Ex-Confederate Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount) arrives at the mobile railroad camp hunting the men who killed his wife.
- Season 2 — 10 episodes — August 12 to October 7, 2012. The show settles into its permanent summer slot.
- Season 3 — 10 episodes — August 10 to October 5, 2013. John Wirth takes over as showrunner from creators Joe and Tony Gayton.
- Season 4 — 13 episodes — August 2 to November 22, 2014. The longest single run of the series.
- Season 5 — 14 episodes — split in half: July 18 to August 29, 2015, then June 11 to July 23, 2016.
About that split final season
AMC renewed the show for a fifth and final season on November 7, 2014, and announced the two-part structure at the same time — seven episodes in the summer of 2015, seven in the summer of 2016. So the "final season" stretched across two calendar years by design, not indecision. The writers at least had one advantage in planning the endgame:
"The end of the story is written down in history," showrunner John Wirth said of the transcontinental railroad — the characters' fates were the open question.
The finale lands, as history requires, at the golden spike in 1869.
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The essentials, if you're starting cold
The series follows the construction of the first transcontinental railroad through the roaming, lawless workers' town that gives the show its name. Mount's Bohannon anchors it, alongside Colm Meaney as Thomas "Doc" Durant — a real Union Pacific tycoon, played with maximum oil — and Common as freedman Elam Ferguson. It was shot around Calgary, Alberta, standing in for the American plains.
A few numbers worth having:
The pilot was AMC's second most-watched series premiere ever at the time, behind only The Walking Dead, and season 1 averaged 3 million viewers an episode.
That made it, briefly, the network's second-biggest original series. It never matched The Walking Dead's cultural footprint, but it did something rarer for the 2010s: it started a story about a railroad, ran exactly as long as the railroad took, and stopped.
Fifty-seven episodes. One spike. Count complete.
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