Literary Locomotives: Nine Books Set on Trains That Show How They Changed the World

Why set a novel on a train? The answer might seem obvious: it’s a narratively and atmospherically rich space, an enclosure in which strangers are cooped up, each with their own different reason for making the journey.

If I were using a contemporary Amtrak as a location, say, the train would be primarily a narrative device, and an airplane would probably work just as well, despite having much less romantic associations and a shorter literary tradition to echo. But a nineteenth-century train—now that’s a whole different beast. Trains were new, and they were taking over the globe with a speed and brute force that appalled some people and thrilled others.

To talk about trains before 1900 was to talk about social mobility, migration, technology, and time itself. (Time zones were actually invented to stop trains colliding.) So a railway novel set back then benefits from those locked-room tensions, but it’s also going to be about travel itself, and all the ways the train shaped our modern world.

The moment I came across a bizarre photograph of a derailed steam train hanging out the upper window of Montparnasse Station in Paris—I bet you’ve seen it—I was compelled to tell the story of what happened that day in October 1895 to the Granville-Paris Express and all on board.

I suppose I could have written a sprawling novel set in various places, recounting the lives of those who crewed, travelled on, owned and managed that train. Instead I found it irresistible to confine The Paris Express within the limits of that particular, doomed train trip, those eight hours rattling and fuming across the northwest of France.

Much more than nowadays, class is key to any nineteenth-century train story; the plump velveted coaches in First Class were an entirely different experience to the hard backless benches in the overcrowded Third Class. The First carriages were even placed in the middle of the train (cushioned between Second and Third) so they wouldn’t be the ones crushed in the event of impact at either end.

But I couldn’t rely on what would come to be some classic elements of twentieth-century train fiction: the dining car, the restroom as a place to hide, and the ability to stroll (or race, pursued by killers) down the corridors. In 1895 French trains offered neither food nor toilets, and each carriage was its own little enclosed room. The only way to get out in transit was to risk your life by opening the door into the wind and inching along the outside, clinging to a rail.

At first I was confounded by this obstacle, but then I let it shape the rhythm of The Paris Express. I thought of the journey as a series of confinements, and each of the five stops between Granville and Paris offered a longed-for release when crew and passengers would get to burst out on the platform and do what they needed in the few minutes before the whistle would blow for departure.

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Émile Zola, The Beast Within

Probably the most famous train novel is Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890, variously translated as The Beast Within, The Beast in Man, The Human Beast or The Monomaniac). His portrayal of the close three-way partnership between driver, stoker and train—encouraged for mercenary reasons by the Company, but a genuine, overwhelming passion nonetheless—inspired many passages in The Paris Express.

Zola’s lurid plot is easily mocked for its relentless association of railway travel with rape and murder, for both crew and passengers…but his writing is so magnificent, this is the one I will always think of when I hear that haunting choo-choo of a passing train in the night.

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century

In the nightmare scenario of being allowed only one book to help me write mine, I would have chosen The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1977) by the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Perhaps it was being an independent scholar untied to any institution that let Schivelbusch throw his net so wide; there seems to be no aspect of how trains changed their lives on which he does not have something profound to say. He is particularly thought-provoking on how perceptions of distance, speed, autonomy and risk were all shook up by the coming of the railways.

Edmund B. Ivatts, Railway Management at Stations

For every novel I write, there is at least one long-out-of-print title I have to track down that proves invaluable, and this time it was Edmund B Ivatts’ Railway Management at Stations (1885), a masterpiece of gnawing anxiety. This English rural stationmaster complains about the countless matters that railway staff had to keep track of, from leaking parcels to loafing colleagues.

I stole anecdotes from this book for The Paris Express (e.g. a stoker who clambers between carriages to discreetly tap every drop of a barrel of whiskey) as well as basing the character of my fretful, judgmental senior guard Mariette on the real Ivatts.

Paul Nizan, Antoine Bloyé

Another famous bleak French novel, Paul Nizan’s Antoine Bloyé (1933), illuminates the railway not as a convenience for its passengers but as a track to which its huge workforce are bound for life. An angry young Communist writing about his own father’s rise from workingclass railwayman to bourgeois manager, Nizan is unsparing on the all-consuming nature of giving your life to the Company.

Dorothy B. Hughes, Dread Journey

The 1930s and 40s could be called the golden age of railway fiction, because train travel was still high-tech and glamorous but sleepers and restaurant cars had already made the long-distance train into a self-contained world in which strangers could pass weeks in enforced intimacy. Dorothy B Hughes’s Dread Journey (1945) is a noir thriller set on a journey from LA to New York that indicts Hollywood power dynamics and misogyny.

This ensemble piece has a memorable lineup of hacks and cynics, and a wonderfully named movie star Kitten Agnew who seems paranoid until she winds up murdered as the train barrels through Kansas. We’re each trapped on our own dread journey, Hughes suggests, and there’s no getting off till death.

Graham Greene, Stamboul Train

Graham Greene’s breakout novel Stamboul Train (1932, retitled Orient Express for the US) is set over a three-day trip from the Flemish city of Ostend to Istanbul. Its colorful cast includes a lesbian journalist and a vain, bestselling author whose portrait was so thinly veiled that J. B. Priestley’s lawyers forced Greene to rewrite twenty pages before publication.

Some find the characterization of Myatt the Jewish businessman nasty, but to me it reads more like Greene’s rueful awareness of pervasive antisemitism in 1930s Europe.

Ethel Lina White, The Wheel Spins

The Wheel Spins (1936) by Welsh crime doyenne Ethel Lina White is the novel from which Hitchcock adapted his The Lady Vanishes (1938). This tale of a disaffected, idle socialite gaslit by her fellow passengers, and forced to grow up fast—to prove she’s not mad and didn’t imagine the missing little old lady—is utterly engrossing.

Rarely has the locked-room setting of a long-distance train felt quite so oppressively claustrophobic.

Chris Van Allsburg, The Polar Express

Even better known in its spookily animated film version, Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express (1985) is both a great Christmas picturebook and a great train story. The idea of a steam train secretly barreling through the night to take children to the North Pole to meet Santa is the sort of magical thinking that makes sense, and the terrifying scene in the 2004 Robert Zemeckis movie in which the train skids across a frozen lake is my favorite derailment on film.

Kenneth Oppel, The Boundless

The novel-on-a-train I recommend most highly is Kenneth Oppel’s The Boundless (2014), a ride that thrills adult readers no less than its target YA audience. The fantasy (a monster train eleven kilometres long with an on-board circus) is firmly rooted in the history of the opening of the Canadian West by a railway expansion built on the exploitation of Chinese workers and the forced displacement of indigenous peoples.

And the bust-ups—avalanches, sasquatches, decapitations!—are truly wild.

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The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue is available via Summit Books.

The New York launch forThe Paris Express will be at the Center for Fiction tonight, RSVP here.