The unsteady flow of viscoelastic fluid in a cylindrical pipe was investigated using the fractional Maxwell model. Two special cases of unsteady pipe flow were expressed. The first is start-up flow, and the second is oscillating flow. The exact solution of start-up flow under a constant pressure gradient was obtained by using the theories of Laplace transform and Fourier-Bessel series for fractional derivatives. The exact solution of oscillating flow was obtained by utilizing the separation of variables.