The creative power of scenery and steam continues to inspire

'Unmitigated England’/Came swinging down the line/That day the February sun/Did crisp and crystal shine’, rejoiced Sir John Betjeman in Great Central Railway, Sheffield Victoria to Banbury as he rode the ‘trail of glory’ of the Victorians’ last mainline railway.

For writers such as Betjeman, railways — especially steam engines — have offered endless inspiration. Pioneered by the British, they denote national pride and nostalgia, as well as providing the perfect metaphor for the narrative journey. David Lean’s 1945 film adaptation of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter delivered one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history when Trevor Howard removed the grit from Celia Johnson’s eye. The railway station where they meet, and where Howard’s character departs by train, marks the beginning and the end of the story and their short, but tender affair.

Train journeys make terrific plot devices. Together with the jeopardy of missing a stop and arriving somewhere unexpected, they are also a place to encounter strangers. A train supplies a cast of characters in a series of rooms, each with a different motive for travel, which is partly why Agatha Christie’s 1934 classic murder mystery Murder on the Orient Express works so splendidly, spawning numerous adaptations with star-studded casts. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes, an avalanche strands the rail passengers, cleverly containing the drama. The film stars Margaret Lockwood as socialite Iris Henderson, whose carriage companion, the elderly governess Miss Froy, disappears, prompting Henderson to question everything and everyone around her, as well as her own sanity.

In film and literature, railway travel means leaving the past behind and embarking on something new. For the excited young wizards of J. K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, waiting for the Hogwarts Express at London King’s Cross station, it’s the start of a new term that promises adventure. Yet boarding the school train, we learn, requires a leap of faith: ‘The tricky part was getting onto platform 9¾, which wasn’t visible to the Muggle [non-wizard] eye. What you had to do was walk through the solid barrier dividing platforms nine and 10. It didn’t hurt, but it had to be done carefully so that none of the Muggles noticed you vanishing.’

Rail travel is about possibilities. ‘In between the stations, things flitted past so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it,’ writes C. S. Lewis in the 1945 sci-fi novel, That Hideous Strength. A similar feeling is imparted in Edward Thomas’s celebrated 1915 poem Adlestrop, with its surprisingly lovely unscheduled train stop in the Cotswolds. ‘Yes. I remember Adlestrop,’ he begins wistfully, recalling its ‘willows, willow-herb, and grass,/And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry’, and the blackbird who serenaded the passengers pausing there.

By contrast, Dickens, writing at a time of rapid rail expansion, conveys the railway’s irrepressible force. ‘Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped… enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up,’ reads his 1848 novel Dombey and Son. ‘In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.’

The steam engine’s unprecedented power is also emphasised in the galloping meter of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1885 children’s poem From a Railway Carriage, which describes it, with more wonder than fear, ‘charging along like troops in a battle,/All through the meadows of horses and cattle’.

By the turn of the century, the railway was often cast as something heartwarming and familiar. In E. Nesbit’s 1906 novel The Railway Children, and its 1970 film adaptation, watching the trains and talking to the railway staff distracts the children from the sadness of being separated from their father. One special train, the Green Dragon, travelling to London, where they last saw him, symbolises the hope of being reunited. ‘Why don’t we ask the next train to take our love to Daddy?’ suggests Phyllis, the youngest child, in a poignant moment in the film.

Sometimes the railway station is associated with beloved characters, such as Paddington Bear, and sometimes the locomotives themselves are the characters — the cheerful Thomas and haughty Gordon in Revd W. V. Awdry’s ‘The Railway Series’ books, for example — whose displays of strength and speed to demonstrate that they are ‘Really Useful Engines’ invariably end in disaster.

‘I don’t think it’s the speed that matters,’ stresses Betjeman in the 1970 documentary Railways For Ever!. ‘It’s the release from tension; the thrill of seeing real country… And for some of us, there will always remain memories of the hiss of steam, the sudden roar, the triumphant scream of the whistle, smuts, and the grimy majesty of the whole thing.'

This feature originally appeared in the December 24, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe