By Matthew Dodd
Consider the train. There is, perhaps, no greater symbol of the industrial age, of mankind’s advancement from agrarian primitivists to mechanised modernists than the hulking mammoth of steam and steel, rattling through sceptred fields and countryside. It permeates the psyche of modern society; the great communitarian dream that we might, united by rail, draw nations and continents together as one. Even as its atomistic rival, the dreaded motorcar, threatens its position, it remains a potent image of our contemporary world, and the hope of what it might be. No wonder, then, that it has seeped so heavily into the language of visual storytelling. The train is, like the telephone booth or the six-shooter, one of those enduringly anomalous staples of the moving image. How else to tear lovers apart or prompt random meetings across a train carriage? For over a century, since cinema’s very conception, the train has been an indispensable tool of symbolic relevance, a tool too often overlooked as merely perfunctory. In considering and unwinding the manifold resonances of the train on film, we might come to a better understanding of just how spiritually relevant this marvel of invention truly is.
Britain’s cultural consciousness, to its great disadvantage, lacks the figure of the cowboy. Where American national storytelling may always fall back on the image of the brooding sheriff traipsing endless flatlands on horseback, Britain is forced to recede deep into its medieval past to find any similarly entrancing historical archetypes. Perhaps, then, we supplant the train as our own kind of cowboy. A post-industrial mammoth, stoic and unfeeling, rounding the hills and valleys with unitary purpose. 1936’s Night Mail, a documentary – perhaps the first in Britain’s cinematic history – charting the progress of the overnight postal train, accompanied by a specially commissioned W.H. Auden poem and Benjamin Britten score, certainly makes this argument. The train hurtles from London to Scotland, an egalitarian troubadour at the nation’s service: ‘letters for the rich, letters for the poor, the shop at the corner, the girl next door’. Workers tirelessly sort through envelopes, placing each on specially chalked town-specific shelves. Mailbags are yanked from hooks by purpose-built nets at passing stations with a mechanical, stolid brutality. Auden’s poem is set to the metre of the train’s passage, a relentless onslaught of brusque couplets, dispassionately toasting the broad cross-section of British life past which the engine runs – ‘letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts, letters to Scotland from the South of France’. That the film, produced by the Post Office so as to increase public perception of the service and to dissuade the challenge of privatisation, should choose to tie the figure of the postal engine into this poetic system is something of a small wonder. This is no mere advertisement, but an argument for the incontrovertible necessity of the railway to British life. Across Night Mail, the railways become veins through which the blood of the nation runs. The train is positioned as a uniquely British kind of hero: deferential, resolute. The documentary serves as a hymn to this unsung champion of modernity. There is a note of George Eliot about the whole thing, an industrial echo of Middlemarch’s closing paragraphs: that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number of locomotives which have run a hidden service from Euston to Aberdeen and rest in unvisited depots.
The conclusion of Night Mail, the poem and the film, is a revelation about the fundamental importance of the postal network, its manifold powers of connection, and thus the train’s ultimate duty in serving the people of Britain their correspondence, ‘for who can bear to feel himself forgotten?’. Films such as Night Mail, state-funded promotions for a nationalised train network, speak to a dream of post-war British connectivity: a nation at one with itself, bridged by a selfless and noble fleet of knightly engines running, unthanked, across the country. The final such film, a sequel to Night Mail, was produced in 1988, directed by Chariots of Fire’s Hugh Hudson and scored by Vangelis, with additional stanzas added to Auden’s poem. This modern version placed emphasis on the scope of British Rail’s commuter classes, drawing together, once more, the mess of British life intertwined by the railway: ‘the teacher, the doctor, the actor in farce, the typist, the banker, the judge in first class. Reading The Times with the crossword to do, returning at night on the six forty-two’. The film, the last to be made pre-privatisation, ends on the still image of an elderly couple reuniting with their children and grandchildren at the platform’s edge, overlaid with the slogan ‘Britain’s Railway’.
The train’s stoical connotations give rise, by turn, to a rich romantic resonance. In 1899, two silent films entitled The Kiss in the Tunnel were produced, the first by George Albert Smith and the second by Bamforth and Company. Neither are especially complex works of cinema, featuring nothing more than establishing shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel, as well as an interposed scene of a couple stealing a kiss in the darkness of the carriage. Between the two films, the only major difference is that Bamforth’s – known for their salacious seaside postcards – significantly increased the passion of the couple’s kiss. By combining the couple’s scene with those of the train entering and leaving the tunnel, Smith’s film represented the arrival of narrative editing in filmmaking. In its way, this minor locomotive love affair invented the very notion of narrative cinema. For over a century, then, the intrigue of the engine – the jeopardy of the darkened train tunnel, the intimacy of the compartment – has brought forth its romantic quality to the moving image.
In his seminal new wave classic Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy mounts his camera to the moving train which tears young lovers Guy and Genevieve apart. Genevieve recedes into the horizon as the train/camera removes Guy inexorably from her. The train, for the lovers, represents the inevitable: a separation as unfeeling and unshakeable as a railway timetable. Thus, the train becomes a method of industrial timekeeping, hours measured out by the comings and goings of engines and carriages. Meetings and affairs are cut short by the necessity of catching a train, a train representative of the outside world – a marriage avoided or a life escaped. Such is the case in Brief Encounter, David Lean and Noel Coward’s masterpiece of post-war British filmmaking. When Laura, the despondent housewife, and Alec, the kind-hearted dentist, meet by chance in a picturehouse, it is the waiting room of Milford Railway Station which becomes their sanctuary: an Edenic place of stillness, free from the rigidity of that real life represented in the arrival of the train. Whilst there, in that liminal space between destinations, they have a kind of freedom, yet a freedom which is ever worn down by the movement of their respective trains towards their station. It is, once more, the train that separates them from one another, and the fear of missing a connection which robs the pair of a real goodbye. The engines represent the reality to these romantic fantasies, tying us invariably to a world which works strictly to timetables and appointments which must be met. As in Night Mail, there is something decidedly British in the character of these trains, apathetic in the annihilation of high-flown romance. The lovers, whose respective worlds are obliterated by their separation, must move on dispassionately, catch the next train, and continue their lives.
The logical counterpoint to the heartbreak of the railway connection is found in Richard Linklater’s sprawling epic of love and transport, the Before trilogy, a cycle that dwells resolutely in the space between trains, and probes the danger of disrupting the regular flow of the timetable. In Before Sunrise, the young ramblers Jesse and Celine – a wandering American 20-something and a French university student – catch eyes across a train carriage bound for Vienna. They exchange reading materials, get to talking, and decide to delay their respective commitments by a day, hop off in Vienna and spend a night together. They amble through the city, falling in a kind of condensed love – the kind of love that perhaps works best with an established time limit – before being borne away by their respective trains. They promise at the platform to meet again in the same spot, in one year’s time. Eight years later, Before Sunset picks up their narrative with the two meeting again for the first time since their lone night together. Erring slightly away from the world of the train, their reunion is marked by a real-time countdown to Jesse’s return flight to America. Surely, were a direct rail route between Paris and Los Angeles established, Linklater would’ve used it here. Nevertheless, the film goes to great lengths to accentuate that kind of rigid timekeeping interposed by a train (plane, in this case) timetable, counting out minutes under the stress of a connection to be caught. The revelatory, subversive decision made at the end of the film, when Jesse elects to lounge in Celine’s apartment at the expense of his flight becomes a transcendentally romantic disruption of the mode of industrial timekeeping. Rather than play his role as modern man, zipping to an airport gate and dashing through security, Jesse does the radical opposite: he wastes time. ‘Baby,’ Celine tells him, ‘you are gonna miss that plane.’ When Jesse, with a coy smile, looks up and says ‘I know’, it is as a man broken free from the oppression of the timetable and, by extension, the outside world.
Consider, then, when next you race for the TransPennine express or collapse into a seat on the LNER service from Newcastle to Edinburgh, that you are engaged in a sacred communion with an industrial object riven with soaring notes of romance and melancholy. You are the mechanical cowboy, the lovesick housewife; the railways the canvas of your own story. Consider the train.
Featured Image: O. Winston Link Museum Archives Collection