A line romance: How real life train journeys compare with the movies

GROWING up in suburban Long Island during the 1960s and 1970s, my surroundings were beautiful, replete with woodlands, unspoiled beaches, and disused mill ponds with resident ducks and swans.

Nevertheless, I was seduced by the siren crying, “Go west, young woman,” and yearned to explore the Big Bad City my parents had fled. By some long-forgotten miracle of negotiation, they allowed me, from the age of about 14, to make the two-hour train journey to Manhattan unaccompanied by an adult.

Though the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) was routinely mocked (and with good reason), I have fond memories of leather seats big enough for three abreast, whose body-polished backs slid along a track, enabling riders to face either direction. The LIRR, a symbol of bondage for so many white-collar commuters, to me represented freedom and the myriad enticements of New York City – off-Broadway theatre, my first illicit cocktail, boldly ordered in a Soho eatery, a silver ring procured in Greenwich Village, which I still wear.

Earlier even than that, on a family trip to England, we persuaded Dad to fork out for first class travel between central London and Potters Bar. I’d seen enough films to know that meant a compartment with its own kerchunking door opening directly onto the platform, and a window that slid open and shut with a satisfying click, enabling those wistful, yearning goodbyes that are the hallmark of every romantic film worth crying over.

Trains and movies – now there’s a marriage made in heaven. Despite everything experience has taught us to expect, such as lengthy and inexplicable delays and backed-up, stinking toilets, it’s no stretch, even while travelling cattle class, to entertain the notion that trains are potentially more glamorous than planes – and that notion mainly comes from the cinema.

Few of us have actually ridden the famous Orient Express, yet virtually everyone knows it’s the dernier cri in luxury. But it’s opulence laced with an exotic whiff of danger, ever since Agatha Christie fired up the engines and set it heading into a snowstorm carrying a coterie of vengeful murderers and a portly Belgian detective with over-active little grey cells.

Despite the narrowness of the planks passing for beds on the Scotland to London overnight sleeper, who, while pulling the blanket to their chin, doesn’t surrender to the fantasy of the curtain-fronted berths seen in Some Like it Hot – complete with Marilyn Monroe’s gloriously wobbling posterior jiggling into position? Or perhaps your mind’s eye supplies the final frames of North by Northwest, when Cary Grant scoops Eva Marie Saint into an upper bunk of the 20th Century Limited for the bonk of a lifetime?

Two of my favourite screwball comedies feature extended train journeys. In Palm Beach Story, Claudette Colbert, using funds procured from the Weenie King, hops a slow train from New York to Florida. During the journey she flirts with John D Hackensacker (played by Rudy Vallee), one of the richest men on earth. When her cases are stolen, stranding her in a pair of pyjamas, she fashions a fetching sarong out of a Pullman-logo towel.

In Twentieth Century, John Barrymore and a negligée-clad Carole Lombard ham it up outrageously in wood-panelled private cubicles while speeding from Chicago to Los Angeles on the eponymous train, which is also host to a harmless lunatic recently escaped from a mental asylum, who’s being chased by ‘the authorities’.

And while not remotely funny, the bulk of the Marlene Dietrich drama Shanghai Express is set on a train that’s attacked by Chinese bandits. As the story goes, director Josef von Sternberg wanted everything in the film to reflect the rhythm of a speeding train, including the way actors delivered their dialogue.

Trains make ideal sets, and metaphors for film-makers. Once on board, with the world hurtling past – fast but not too fast to marvel at and wonder about – passengers form a closed community. Huffington Post’s film blogger, John Farr, writes, “The train experience is probably the most intimate forced gathering of community we have. Through overheard conversations and visual observations, we absorb the lives of our neighbours ... We are voyeurs and silent judges, watching the movie of real life all around us.”

Relationships are born, play out and sometimes finish in the time it takes to move between cities or across continents. Think of Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise; the protagonists in the aforementioned Hitchcock classic, North by Northwest; or those in his film Strangers on a Train, two men who, shortly after meeting, hatch the most dastardly of murder plots.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve internalised the Train Platform Goodbye as a pinnacle of romance more potent than marching up an aisle swathed in meringue. The scene is a beautiful, old-fashioned train station – the sort with gingerbread buttresses and a proper café. There is billowing smoke – none of your electric trains here – and carriages with working windows, to lean out of for that last, lingering kiss. There should be soldiers. One partner boards the train, the other remains on the platform, but not stationary, no: as the train pulls out, handkerchief flapping (when not mopping away tears), you run and run until, if you’re very, very lucky, Gary Cooper sweeps you into his arms – and his life – as he did Audrey Hepburn at the finale of Love in the Afternoon.

You can’t chase after a cruise ship without getting wet, or see off a flight-bound lover at the boarding gate, thanks to airport security measures. Bus? Car? No, for a full strings send-off, it has to be a train.

Other swoon-worthy variations are found in Indiscretion of an American Wife, starring Jennifer Jones as a married woman having it off with an Italian played by Montgomery Clift, and Jones again in Since You Went Away, where she tries, but fails, to catch up with a train speeding Robert Walker off into the distance. In Out of Africa, Meryl Streep falls for Robert Redford as she’s boarding a train, and her disappointment when he fails to join her is palpable. And I am contractually obliged to mention Brief Encounter (not a personal favourite), in which Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard are brought together by a cinder kicked up off the train tracks. Johnson knows her heart is in peril when, watching Howard’s train leave the station, she realises that he will not tell his wife, “I met such a nice woman at the Kardomah.”

As well as being personally romantic, cinema trains can convey the romantic dreams of entire nations, especially for us Americans. Travelling on foot or horseback gave way to the stagecoach, then man threw steel across the length and breadth of the land and shot noisy, steam-snorting behemoths rattling down those rails. At one end, grimy men shovelled coal, while at the other, genteel passengers sat in neat rows, or, if better off, were waited on hand and foot by uniformed, forelock-tugging porters. Ah, those were the days – at least on screen.

As Laurence Kardish, author of Junctions and Journey: Trains and Film and former curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s film department, writes, “Trains represent progress, and the past, and the future, and death. They always signify change. They’re protean as a metaphor, and yet they’re also profoundly romantic objects in and of themselves.”

You’ll find a vivid example in the opening of The Harvey Girls: a train flies through a vast, empty expanse, straight at the camera. The giant machine rolls into a Wild West town so freshly minted that it could have shot up a day earlier. Out pour several dozen women, who have arrived to set up a restaurant. Another passenger is Judy Garland, a mail-order bride who quickly decides that slinging hash is preferable to a loveless union. Or, picture Gary Cooper again, this time playing the former lawman in High Noon. Abandoned by all, he waits stoically for his arch enemy’s arrival on the midday train, fully cognisant that one of them must die. And, of course, the indelible image of Harry Potter boarding the Hogwarts Express to begin his new life as a wizard.

Once on board a train, we are trapped and passive, but in a good way. It’s a relief to surrender one’s vigilance, and we submit to confinement in order to escape. There’s a sensual element to a train’s relentless rhythm that encourages meditation. Others are driving and navigating, so travelling companions can interact, and there’s a comforting sense of certainty emanating from those gleaming, undeviating tracks. I also love being treated like a grown-up who can be trusted not to lose her head in the presence of liquids or sharp objects. Finally, the scenery’s often absorbing, and infinitely more arresting than the endless landscape of clouds spotted during any flight.

Writing this, I’m reminded that late at night, lying in my childhood bed, I heard train whistles wail as they approached our local station. No matter how isolated and lonely I felt, it testified that I was connected to the wider world – mine for the price of a ticket. No wonder I’m always pleased to say, “I’m on the train.”

Twitter: @RandallWrites