The history of cinema has always been tied to trains – and sometimes, in the unfortunate case of damsels in distress, quite literally to the train tracks themselves.
The Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat helped establish the extraordinary power of moving images to make an everyday event feel like a spectacle.
Just a few years later, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery took things considerably further. Released in 1903, the short film turned a train robbery into an action story, using location shooting and pioneering editing techniques – including its famous final shot – to create a sense of movement and suspense.
And it is not difficult to see why. A train brings strangers together, traps enemies in the same confined space, provides a moving backdrop for a chase, or simply gives two people somewhere to sit, talk, maybe even fall in love, while the world rushes past outside the window.
More than a century after those early experiments, Adam Shankman’s Stop! That! Train! is the latest film to climb aboard.
The film follows best friends and train stewardesses Tess and DeeDee as they find themselves aboard the luxurious Glamazonian Express. When a catastrophic storm threatens to derail the high-speed train, the pair must join forces with the snooty first-class crew and President Judy Gagwell, played by RuPaul, to save the day. With a cast packed with RuPaul’s Drag Race favourites, the film promises to bring a distinctly camp spin to the disaster movie.
But Stop! That! Train! is far from the first film to understand that putting a bunch of people on a train is a recipe for great cinema. From Hitchcock thrillers and Agatha Christie mysteries to zombie outbreaks, romantic encounters and dystopian revolutions, filmmakers have been returning to the railway carriage for more than a century.
So, from silent-era masterpieces to runaway locomotives, here are 10 of the best train movies ever made.
10. Before Sunrise (1995)
Not every great train movie needs murder, explosions or an impending disaster. Sometimes you just need two beautiful strangers falling in love.
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise begins when American traveller Jesse meets French student Céline on a train travelling through Europe. He persuades her to get off with him in Vienna, and the pair spend the night wandering the city, talking about love, life, relationships and everything in between.
The train is only the starting and ending point, but it is crucial to the film’s romantic premise. Two strangers meet while travelling and decide to take a chance on one another. Few films have captured the possibilities of a chance encounter quite so beautifully.
9. Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is also not technically a train movie from beginning to end, but its railway sequences are so integral to the film’s comic energy that it deserves a place here.
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians who disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band after witnessing a mob killing. Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Kane, the band’s singer, and the resulting journey provides the setting for one of Hollywood’s greatest comedies.
The train becomes a wonderfully contained playground for Wilder’s jokes, disguises, romantic complications and increasingly impossible attempts to maintain the characters’ various identities.
And if Stop! That! Train! has inherited even a little of that anarchic spirit, audiences are in for a wild ride.
8. Unstoppable (2010)
Tony Scott’s Unstoppable takes one of the simplest disaster-movie premises imaginable: a train is moving too fast, and somebody has to stop it.
With Spider-Man not on hand, it’s left to two railway workers (played by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine) to attempt to prevent an unmanned freight train carrying a dangerous cargo from crashing into a populated area.
The genius of Unstoppable is its simplicity. There is no complicated mythology or elaborate conspiracy: just a very large train, a rapidly approaching disaster combined with the raw charisma of Denzel Washington.
The result is an old-fashioned, hugely effective action thriller in the vein of Speed (1994).
7. Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
Few fictional trains are as famous as the Orient Express, and few train movies have made better use of it than Sidney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express.
When an American businessman is murdered aboard the luxurious train, Hercule Poirot finds himself with a carriage full of suspects – all of whom appear to have their own secrets.
The film’s greatest weapon is its cast, with Albert Finney joined by the likes of Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and Anthony Perkins. The luxurious train becomes a locked-room mystery on wheels, with Poirot forced to work out which passenger is hiding the truth.
6. The General (1926)
Before trains became synonymous with thrillers and disaster movies, Buster Keaton was already turning them into spectacular comedy-action machines.
In The General, Keaton plays a Southern locomotive engineer whose beloved train is stolen during the American Civil War. He sets off in pursuit, leading to a series of increasingly elaborate chases and stunts.
The film’s train sequences remain extraordinary nearly a century later. Keaton’s deadpan physical comedy is matched by some genuinely impressive railway action. You can watch this delight – and his other masterpieces – on YouTube for FREE. I implore you do so.
5. Brief Encounter (1945)
David Lean’s Brief Encounter demonstrates that the most devastating train movie of all can be almost entirely quiet.
Laura Jesson, a married woman, meets doctor Alec Harvey by chance at a railway station. What begins as an innocent friendship gradually develops into something more complicated, forcing both to confront the boundaries imposed by their existing lives.
The railway station becomes a recurring meeting point and a symbol of both possibility and separation. Few romantic films have wrung so much emotion from a train timetable.
4. Strangers on a Train (1951)
The genius of Alfred Hitchcock was never going to let a train journey remain an ordinary train journey.
In Strangers on a Train, tennis player Guy Haines meets the mysterious Bruno Antony aboard a train. Their conversation takes a sinister turn when Bruno suggests that they each murder someone in the other person’s life, thereby eliminating any obvious motive.
What follows is classic Hitchcock: mistaken identities, psychological manipulation and an increasingly desperate attempt to escape a situation that keeps tightening around its protagonist.
The opening train sequence alone is enough to secure its place on this list, but the film’s brilliantly constructed sense of dread makes it one of the essential railway thrillers.
3.Train to Busan (2016)
Forget falling asleep and missing your stop, or having to ride the Central Line on a sweltering summer’s day…
Yeon Sang-ho’s hugely entertaining horror-thriller, Train to Busan, provides the ultimate train nightmare. It traps its characters aboard a high-speed train heading from Seoul to Busan as the undead rapidly begin taking over the carriages.
The confined setting makes every carriage feel like a new battleground, while the film balances spectacular action with surprisingly affecting character drama. It is frantic, frightening and often genuinely moving.
2. Snowpiercer (2013)
Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer takes a train journey and turns it into a wildly inventive dystopian nightmare.
After a failed attempt to reverse global warming leaves Earth frozen, the last surviving humans live aboard a perpetually moving train. Society has been divided according to class, with the wealthy enjoying luxury at the front while the poorest passengers are crammed into brutal conditions at the rear.
Chris Evans leads a revolt through the carriages, with each new section revealing another bizarre and disturbing aspect of this miniature society. Visually striking, politically charged and frequently brutal, Snowpiercer proves not only the genius of Bong Joon Ho, but also that a train can be an entire world unto itself.
- The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Four armed men hijack a New York subway train and demand a ransom from the city. If their demands aren’t met, they will start killing passengers.
That is essentially all the setup The Taking of Pelham One Two Three needs.
Joseph Sargent’s thriller turns the New York subway system into a pressure cooker, with Walter Matthau’s transit police lieutenant attempting to negotiate with the hijackers while the authorities race against time.
Tense, gritty and packed with dry humour, the 1974 original remains one of the great urban thrillers. Just please, for the sake of your sanity, avoid the terrible Travolta-driven remake.
Stop! That! Train! looks set to add another, considerably campier, addition to this list when it arrives in UK cinemas on 21 August.
So whether you prefer your trains carrying lovers, detectives, zombies, revolutionaries or people in elaborate drag, cinema has you covered.
