Naughty Dog’s 2009 video game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, regarded by many as the best in its series, contains what is perhaps the definitive train fight sequence of contemporary video games. Chapters 13 and 14, “Locomotion,” and “Tunnel Vision,” respectively, form a single, uninterrupted sequence aboard a train hurtling through the Himalayan mountains loaded with illegal armaments and stolen artefacts. The player—in the role of thief, con man and one-man-militia, Nathan Drake—must fight their way to the front of the train, scrounging weapons and ammunition, and commandeering the turret of an anti-air tank along the way. This whole sequence is awesome. 

Trains in video games are awesome.

In any video game possessive of rail transportation infrastructure, I will, without fail, waste an inordinate amount of time dicking around on trains. A favourite pastime of my brother and mine was (and remains) booting up MX vs. ATV: Untamed’s “Free Roam,” mode, loading into the “Lakefield” map, and jamming out to early-2000s Christian pop punk whilst repeatedly launching our characters into the passing freight trains in vain attempts to board them. I spent many hours in middle school at a friend’s house trying (and often failing) to take off in a jet fighter from a train in Just Cause 3, so when Just Cause 4 incorporated a train with a rail cannon into its admittedly lacklustre campaign, I was nonetheless beside myself with delight. Video games seem to fundamentally understand the joy of trains. This, I imagine, is why it irks me so much that films don’t.

That is to say, Western films don’t (I should clarify this to mean movies from the capital-‘W’ geopolitical West, as opposed to the taxonomical generic category of the Western genre). There’s a certain romance about rail travel that few who’ve not read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums can adequately articulate. To me, the romance of rail travel in many ways resembles the romance of cinema: as a medium, it is simultaneously necessarily communal (be that by way of theatre or passenger carriage) and effortlessly luxurious. Cinema and train travel both carry a conflation with affluence in our Golden-aged imaginings of them, not to mention respective pretensions  of elitist, high-art sensibility. Trains are often lauded as the most “civilized” method of transportation and yet—much like how film remains an omnipresent pop-cultural force in spite (or maybe because of) the uptight elitism of such institutions as the Academy or the jury at Cannes—they represent nonetheless the most populist vessel of human movement. This romance rail travel retains to a degree that no lesser form of transportation such as, say, airplanes can attest (which, by the way, fuck airplanes. By every measure the worst widely used method of travel. We should scrap each and every one of those aluminum hunks of garbage and use their fuselages to build a transcontinental railway à la… well, I get ahead of myself).

Perhaps the closest I’d previously come to being properly able to express this romance was on a train ride home from Toronto with my then-girlfriend. We’d been in my least favourite city in Eastern Ontario to tour the three universities housed in its downtown core. This was at a point in time when I still harboured delusions of going to art school. After two days of trudging around TO and the repetitive soul-death that is academic networking, I settled down on the train to watch that most admittedly excellent of all first-year-film-studies movies, Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The experience (much unlike the arduous task of watching movies on a plane) was that of a serene dopamine slide into my own sunken place—the marriage of two mediums for whom I reserve great adoration, the sensorial caress of the cinematic form whilst being rocked to sleep by the romantic sway of the rail car. 

This romance remains, however, largely absent from contemporary European/American English-language dramas on or about trains. None thus far (in my estimations) have successfully blended the classical luxury of rail travel holistically into the medium of film. From Russia With Love (1963) approaches an understanding of it, an understanding which many subsequent Bond films shamelessly imitate to considerably lesser effect. Murder of the Orient Express (2017) fails to properly centre its eponymous steam engine, and whilst 2014’s “Mummy on the Orient Express,” stands as one of the best episodes of the BBC Cymru reboot of Doctor Who, its titular train serves more as a backdrop and incidental character than a central narrative device. 

It seems an odd coincidence, then, that two of the most critically and commercially successful South Korean films outside of Korea happen to bear the shared setting of “on a train”. Not only that, both employ the train as a setting and as a motif to great effect (albeit in slightly different ways); essentializing its narrative importance, making them not just movies “on” trains, but movies about trains.

Perhaps second only to his 2019 film Parasite in pop-cultural power, Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) is one of the most successful Korean films of the past decade—so much so that it’s prompted a Netflix television adaptation starring Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs and Sean motherfucking Bean of GoldenEye 007-for Nintendo-64 fame—in spite of its utterly ludicrous premise of a post-apocalyptic civilization residing in a perpetually globe-touring passenger train. 

What Snowpiercer is to Marxist dramas and Chris Evans performances that are not in Marvel Studios films, Train to Busan (2016) is to the horror genre—it’s excellent, and takes place on a train. “Why trains?” you might ask. “Why this of all the possible inane topics? I thought you’d be taking this seriously with the last column!” In all honesty, the train thing might boil down to the fact that I routinely score 194 on the RAADS-R test, but that’s a cop-out answer! In true cinevangelical fashion, permit me to elucidate a response by means of a rather lengthy aside.

For my seventh birthday, I received a magazine—dated March 2009—all about model railroads. I don’t remember who gifted this to me (I was seven) but I do know it had a profound effect on my nascent psyche. When on a separate occasion in my nascent-millenary early childhood I saw a 2006 President’s Choice-branded “Big 10 Express” model train set at the grocery store with my mother, I pestered my parents incessantly to purchase it for me, until they finally relented come Christmas time.

In comparison to the absurd quality of most model railroading paraphernalia, this grocery-store-gotten die-cast locomotive was, charitably, a hunk of shit. Still, the sets produced by President’s Choice from 1993 to sometime in the early 2000s today find value as collectors’ items noteworthy for the novelty of their having been produced by, of all establishments, a Canadian food oligopoly.

This acquisition spurred me into model train enthusiasm at, arguably, far too young an age. This obsession typically reserved for men in the midst of midlife crises gripped me as a pre-teen then-boy—though in fairness considering the number of profoundly autistic and chronically online transgender women whose special interest is railroading, this should hardly have come as a surprise—the pipeline, as they say, is strong.

This erstwhile model train enthusiasm would continue to deepen for many years and, for a brief spell in my tweens, I became a proper hobbyist in my own right. My gauge of choice was HO (“Half-O,” or half the standard gauge of most model railroads) though this decision was more so a product of circumstance than any discriminating taste on my part. The locomotive I already had was scaled by the HO gauge. It followed then, that I should pursue that one as my gauge of choice. Scale modelling is an expensive hobby for anyone, let alone a twelve-year-old, though still at my height I had a modest setup that covered a 4’x6’ piece of plywood which nested under the bed. My father and I would often butt heads over the direction this would take—he viewed it more as an exercise in play, whilst I wanted to build something aesthetically beautiful to be left untampered with and undisturbed. I was most definitely the sort of kid who lined up her toys according to some unseen logic, or else positioned them in ornate displays rather than do anything as debased as play with them. Take from this what you will, though rest assured my therapist and a number of psychology majors with whom I’m acquainted have suspicions as to a particular DSM-5 subheading for which I qualify.

My model train days are however, long behind me. Being now a writer, and no longer a virgin (whoops), my taste has somewhat mutated to suit my occupational pathology. The key to being a writer is, after all, not so much about writing whatsoever, but rather about harbouring extremely elitist opinions about notebook brands and writing implements. Thus, in my nascent twenties I've suffered a pronounced transference of interest from scale replica trains to French fountain pens, luxury Japanese keyboards, and, it would seem, critically-acclaimed Korean movies.

Still, as far as contemporary Oscar-bait cinema goes, Snowpiercer is a railroader’s wet dream. Apart from the sheer adulation I and many others express at such a spectacular depiction of, fully-automated, luxury imagined rail travel, that the film principally concerns a class uprising aboard the titular Transperneige (as it was called in the 1982 French graphic novel from which the film was adapted) is fitting—commuter rail is, after all, the most communist form of transportation. The Korean–American nature of this joint production fascinates me, as Snowpiercer is itself deeply European in its sensibilities. Sure, Korea is certainly known for its high-speed rail network, though Snowpiercer’s deeply stratified class vision literalized through the allocation of its cars feels almost Victorian, its ideals of violent rebellion are of a particularly French revolutionary bent, and its near-fascistic depiction of its titular locomotive borrows more than a little from Mussolini-era Italy. 

Perhaps the film's multilingualism—both literal in its script, and figurative in the symbology of its aesthetics—speaks to its broad, critical crossover appeal. Snowpiercer is extremely thematically accessible. Its narrative demonstration of class politics is extremely blunt, and no matter how much John Hurt and Tilda Swinton chew their respective scenery, they can’t change the fact that the dialogue is often utilitarian above all else. Again, this could be merely a holdover of its comic book origins, though for the purposes of the film’s didactic storytelling, it remains perfectly useful. 

Train to Busan is less literal in its employment of the train as a narrative device. Here the titular commuter receptacle functions initially as an excuse to bring together a number of characters within a confined space. Director Yeon Sang-ho employs the same trick prolifically used by horror legend George A. Romero throughout his monumental Dead franchise (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, et. al.): confine the action to a claustrophobia-inducing locale, introduce zombies, watch everything go to shit. It’s a delightfully simple and straightforward formula that, with the right amount of filmmaking prowess, proves devastatingly effective.

If the film contains a rail-based metaphor it no doubt takes the form of the train’s direct and deliberate pacing. Train to Busan scarcely deviates from its self-declared formula, barrelling ahead at a non-stop fervour. The plot is already decided, it’s the interstices that make it interesting. In the parlance of Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs), this “Railroading,” as it is called, is frowned upon. Within the framework of cinema, however, this pre-inscribed plot works wonders to engage the audience. The moments of levity never hamper the overpowering mood of Train to Busan as it chugs determinedly towards its conclusion.

In October of 2021, I undertook a journey from my place of residence here in Peterborough to visit a (different) then-soon-to-be girlfriend in Montréal, Québec. The trip, to the Gzowski College GO Bus terminal, from there to Oshawa via GO Bus, from Oshawa to Montreal via VIA commuter rail, and from Montreal’s Gare Centrale/Bonaventure Métro station to her apartment, took approximately eight hours. In this time I did absolutely no work, I read none of the books I’d brought, played no video games, and watched none of the episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor which I’d downloaded to my laptop. Instead, I listened to Big Thief’s album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, and stared out the window thinking about Train to Busan to distract from the pit growing in my stomach at the fact that I was about to spend four days sleeping in the same bed as a woman I had an embarrassingly large crush on. I felt like the protagonist of a film by the Dardenne brothers.

By way of conclusion here, I’d like to retread a claim I made once in a profoundly overzealous undergraduate essay: all films are fundamentally linear. Fans of Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, and David Lynch might protest, though consider that film only ever goes forward. No matter how many times you rewatch Twin Peaks, it will always come out the same. The trick, as it were, only works once. In this way, movies become a lot like trains. Trains, like film, follow a technologically-imposed and predetermined trajectory which, over the course of an extended period of time, displace their users either spatially (in the case of trains) or temporally (in the case of film). Both are like life insofar as life only ever goes forward, though while the entropic momentum endemic to living is constant, the fact of our being set adrift in a Godless and ambivalent universe makes it far more closely resemble a game of Asteroids than, say, The Tree of Life (2011).

If anything, I’ve accidentally stolen this notion from a professor of mine who opened a class on film movements with a comparison of the railroad and the moving image by way of reference to a Marxist text to which I have previously alluded. I suppose to that effect, none of these ideas are new—and I’m hardly the first transbian to have a hard-on for trains. Still, in an age where both film and rail travel are seeing a slow, strangled demise, I can’t help but feel a nostalgic romance for these monoliths whose respective declines began arguably before I was even born. 

All things come to an end, though time itself will long outlive the point where every locomotive lies rusted, and every strip of celluloid degrades. The feeling I get at the end of a good movie is much like that of disembarking at the last stop of a train. Though one thing is terminated, life continues. Few things remind me of my profound inconsequence in the scope of the material universe. Scarce other feelings come close to this in terms of pure catharsis. We can’t control when we get off the train of life, though it is bound to happen sooner or later. So vast is the body of film currently in circulation that one cannot possibly hope to actually consume it all. All we can do in the interim is try and make the most of the ride.