railways in fiction and fantasy

[BR60103]

Patricia Wrede and Carolyn Stevermer The Mislaid Magician.  Involves very early railways interacting with the magical lines. 3rd book in a series, but the first to have trains.

 

http://www.pcwrede.com/books/regency-magic-kate-and-cecelia/

 

Steam Bird about a steam powered aeroplane.

 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2751814-steam-bird

[jpendle]

Almost forgot.

 

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! By Harry Harrison.

 

Nuclear trains and steam powered aeroplanes, in a world where the USA is still a British Colony.

 

John P

[Edwardian]

Are we forgetting the train that leaves platform 9 and 3/4 at London Kings Cross and arrives at a country station called Hoggs Mead, which in the films looks remarkably like Goathland, having travelled over the horse shoe viaduct in Scotland on the way. This journey features several times in different books and films from the Harry Potter series.

 

Given that they leave between platforms 9 and 10, I would expect the little Wizards and Witches to attend Cambridge.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

I quite forgot an entirely railway story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 'Incident at Krechetovka Station'. For those who appear to enjoy dystopian visions, ths is a fictional glimpse into a dystopian reality of not so very long ago. (Railways figure fairly heavily in his non-fiction, especially the 'stolypin car'. Look it up...)

 

 

And (as per the film dialogue - can't remember if the book is the same) has Hermione Granger saying she will go and talk to the driver. Therefore, depending on which reality you accept. either Taw Valley or Olton Hall (perhaps both) had some form of corridor tender or sophisticated passenger-crew intercom...

 Er, magic remember, like what HG was good at?.

 

She just waves her little stick with the incantation 'Comunicus Footplateoikus' and the job is done...

[The Johnster]

Almost forgot.

 

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! By Harry Harrison.

 

Nuclear trains and steam powered aeroplanes, in a world where the USA is still a British Colony.

 

John P

 

News to me. When did we lose that, then?

[The Johnster]

I quite forgot an entirely railway story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 'Incident at Krechetovka Station'. For those who appear to enjoy dystopian visions, ths is a fictional glimpse into a dystopian reality of not so very long ago. (Railways figure fairly heavily in his non-fiction, especially the 'stolypin car'. Look it up...)

 

 

 Er, magic remember, like what HG was good at?.

 

She just waves her little stick with the incantation 'Comunicus Footplateoikus' and the job is done...

HG always struck me as a pretty determined type, and if she wanted to talk to the driver, then no lack of corridor tenders would stop her and she wouldn't need magic; the driver would be talked to!

[Zomboid]

A decent chunk of Final Fantasy 15 takes place on a train.

And isn't one of the characters in FF8 a crank?

Trains in computer games aren't that uncommon really, Half Life 2 starts on a train, and you visit sidings & tunnels at least once more after that. There's the deeprun tram in World of Warcraft. Mine cart levels on Donkey Kong 2 on the SNES... JRPGs are a fairly happy hunting ground for trains in my not hugely extensive experience.

[rockershovel]

Buster Keaton's quite brilliant film "The General" with its totally non-CGI collapsing viaduct, and the absurdly dangerous gag in which he sits on the connecting rod of a moving locomotive...

[rockershovel]

Trains frequently appear in Second World War literature, usually as a metaphor, or literal setting for passing into captivity, or worse.

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

Buster Keaton's quite brilliant film "The General" with its totally non-CGI collapsing viaduct, and the absurdly dangerous gag in which he sits on the connecting rod of a moving locomotive...

 ... and all the other stuff as well. The stunt of dropping the baulk of timber to knock away the tie fouling the line alone could have gone so horribly wrong, and that's the least dangerous of the railway stunts in this movie I think. It is a totally improbable feast and comes out every christmas to show the younger generation the 'unthinkable'.

 

Kids! Really don't try this at home, or anywhere else...

[sir douglas]

A decent chunk of Final Fantasy 15 takes place on a train.

 

i wouldnt know i dont anything about the FF games after 10 or before 7

[BR60103]

Another Keaton film with a train is Our Hospitality.  Buster takes a train to the American outback. The locomotive looks like Rocket; the track looks like nothing on earth.

[Guius]

News to me. When did we lose that, then?

There was a bit of a spat a few years ago and the colonists tried to make a very large cup of tea in Boston Harbour (not Lincolnshire), unfortunately they forgot the golden rule of brewing up (one spoon of tea per person plus one for the pot etc.) and proceeded to scale up the proportions to one tea chest per colony (how they proposed to warm the pot only heaven knows). Any how, after this very unsatisfactory cuppa they resolved never ever to try and make a decent cup of tea again, as the years have gone by they have completely lost the technology. As you will gather, with the loss of regular tea breaks through out the day to keep them on an even keel and bring brief moments of introspection to their lives, the colonists have had to invented their own language in order to compensate some what for the loss of this civilising libation. Please don't try to communicate in this lingo, it will only confuse them. For instance the request for faggots in a café will meet with some very funny looks, they also like to kick any passing ass they may come across ( I've communicated my concern to the RSPCA about this custom ). So there it is in a nut shell, if you travel to the colonies remember to take a flask with you to be on the safe side.

 

Best

 

Guy

[John B]

There are railways of a future and retro style in several of Alastair Reynolds' excellent sci-fi novels.

 

Chasm City (future) and Terminal World (retro), in particular..

 

The late Iain Banks incorporated railway viginettes in some of his contemporary Scottish fiction novels (The Crow Road, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Stonemouth), and the Forth Rail Bridge was the central theme in the dreamworld of the coma patient in "The Bridge".

[PatB]

Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series contain a significant amount of shenanigans on the London Underground.

 

Whilst only peripherally rail related, the denoument of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul takes place in the Midland Hotel at St Pancras.

 

And, of course, there is the excellent short story, A Subway Named Mobius.

[Edwardian]

There was a bit of a spat a few years ago and the colonists tried to make a very large cup of tea in Boston Harbour (not Lincolnshire), unfortunately they forgot the golden rule of brewing up (one spoon of tea per person plus one for the pot etc.) and proceeded to scale up the proportions to one tea chest per colony (how they proposed to warm the pot only heaven knows). Any how, after this very unsatisfactory cuppa they resolved never ever to try and make a decent cup of tea again, as the years have gone by they have completely lost the technology. As you will gather, with the loss of regular tea breaks through out the day to keep them on an even keel and bring brief moments of introspection to their lives, the colonists have had to invented their own language in order to compensate some what for the loss of this civilising libation. Please don't try to communicate in this lingo, it will only confuse them. For instance the request for faggots in a café will meet with some very funny looks, they also like to kick any passing ass they may come across ( I've communicated my concern to the RSPCA about this custom ). So there it is in a nut shell, if you travel to the colonies remember to take a flask with you to be on the safe side.

 

Best

 

Guy

 

Quite, that and the fact that they play Rugby in body armour and Rounders instead of Cricket and have a president called, IIRC, Fart.

 

Bless!

[sir douglas]

some Ghibli now

 

Spirited Away (2001) a single line across a vast flast plain under shallow water

https://filmfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/spiritedawaytracks.jpg

 

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2015/41/1444230061-scan3-copy-crop4.jpg

 

Howls moving Castle (2004) steam trams

 

the main character Sophie gets on the tram

 

the tram passes over a an armoured train

 

https://images.moviepilot.com/images/c_limit,q_auto:good,w_600/xcomwbdf25eivzgz9fag/a-contemplative-sophie-in-howl-s-moving-castle.jpg

 

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f7/f7/24/f7f72439d0c54d3a037aa6775a76641a--howls-moving-castle-hayao-miyazaki.jpg

 

The wind rises (2013)

 

 

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/wind-rises-the-2013-016-train-exhaust-mingling-with-clouds.jpg?itok=JuHQ-5aN

 

https://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18uprq2rmefqujpg/original.jpg

 

 

there is also a scene of a tank engine shunting timber which has a very reasonable representation on stephenson valve gear, ive just flicked through the film but cant find it

 

[john new]

Re Ben Aaronoveitch. Plus there is the Railway Detective series of books (Edward Marston). They are based on actual railways though rather than fictional geography.

[sir douglas]

Laputa Castle in the sky (1986)

 

[PatB]

There is a lengthy on-train sequence at the beginning of the film Dead Man as Johnny Depp's character travels into the C19th American West to take up a job that is subsequently withdrawn. The scene is effectively set by the gradual transformation of his fellow travellers from respectable suburbanites to fur clad mountain men over the course of the journey.

 

Stephen King's Dark Tower series includes a lengthy section in abandoned subway type tunnels and, of course, the character Odetta loses her legs in an incident on the New York subway. 

[Andy Kirkham]

The Chronicles of Didcot?

At Didcot a porter walked down the train, shouting, "All change!" so he got out. It was now nearly midnight, but there was a pale moon with a few ragged clouds drifting over it. After some inquiry he learned that there would be a connection for Oxford shortly. A few other passengers were held up in the same way as himself. They tramped up and down the platform, talking in low voices,as though they were in a church, or huddled in the wooden seats. Cadogan sat on a pile of mail-bags until a porter came and turned him off. The night was warm and very quiet.

 

After rather a long time a train drew into the platform and they all got into it, but the porters called out "All change!" again, so they climbed out and watched the lights being extinguished carriage by carriage. Cadogan asked a porter what time the the Oxford train was expected, and the porter referred him to another porter. This authority, discovered drinking tea in the buffet, said without any apparent sense of outrage that there would be no more trains to Oxford that night. The statement provoked some opposition from a third porter, who maintained that the 11.53 had not come in yet, but the porter drinking tea pointed out that as from yesterday the 11.53 was not going to come in any more, ever again. He banged his fist on the table with frequency and force to emphasize this point. The third porter remained unconvinced. A small, sleepy-eyed boy was, however, dispatched to consult the driver of the train that had just arrived, and he confirmed that there were no more trains to Oxford that night. Moreover, the boy added unhelpfully, that the buses had stopped running two hours ago.

 

Faced with these unpalatable facts, something of Cadogan's enthusiasm for his holiday began to wane; but he quickly shook off this feeling as being shamefully indicative of a middle-aged desire for comfort and convenience. The other passengers, grumbling bitterly, had departed in search of hotel accommodation, but he decided to leave his bag and make for the Oxford road in the hope of getting a lift from a belated car or lorry. As he walked, he admired the effect of the weak, colourless moonlight on the ugly brick houses,with their diminutive asphalt paths, their iron railings and their lace curtains, and on the staring windows of Methodist chapels. He felt, too, something of that oddly dispassionate lifting of the heart which he knew meant poetry, but he was aware that such emotions are shy beasts, and for the moment he turned a blind eye to them for fear of frightening them away.

 

It is so vividly pictured that that it's hard to imagine it wasn't derived from personal experience.

 

From The Moving Toyshop, a whodunnit by Edmund Crispin (set in 1938, but published in 1946).

Edited July 27, 2017 by Andy Kirkham

[Edwardian]

 

At Didcot a porter walked down the train, shouting, "All change!" so he got out. It was now nearly midnight, but there was a pale moon with a few ragged clouds drifting over it. After some inquiry he learned that there would be a connection for Oxford shortly. A few other passengers were held up in the same way as himself. They tramped up and down the platform, talking in low voices,as though they were in a church, or huddled in the wooden seats. Cadogan sat on a pile of mail-bags until a porter came and turned him off. The night was warm and very quiet.

 

After rather a long time a train drew into the platform and they all got into it, but the porters called out "All change!" again, so they climbed out and watched the lights being extinguished carriage by carriage. Cadogan asked a porter what time the the Oxford train was expected, and the porter referred him to another porter. This authority, discovered drinking tea in the buffet, said without any apparent sense of outrage that there would be no more trains to Oxford that night. The statement provoked some opposition from a third porter, who maintained that the 11.53 had not come in yet, but the porter drinking tea pointed out that as from yesterday the 11.53 was not going to come in any more, ever again. He banged his fist on the table with frequency and force to emphasize this point. The third porter remained unconvinced. A small, sleepy-eyed boy was, however, dispatched to consult the driver of the train that had just arrived, and he confirmed that there were no more trains to Oxford that night. Moreover, the boy added unhelpfully, that the buses had stopped running two hours ago.

 

Faced with these unpalatable facts, something of Cadogan's enthusiasm for his holiday began to wane; but he quickly shook off this feeling as being shamefully indicative of a middle-aged desire for comfort and convenience. The other passengers, grumbling bitterly, had departed in search of hotel accommodation, but he decided to leave his bag and make for the Oxford road in the hope of getting a lift from a belated car or lorry. As he walked, he admired the effect of the weak, colourless moonlight on the ugly brick houses,with their diminutive asphalt paths, their iron railings and their lace curtains, and on the staring windows of Methodist chapels. He felt, too, something of that oddly dispassionate lifting of the heart which he knew meant poetry, but he was aware that such emotions are shy beasts, and for the moment he turned a blind eye to them for fear of frightening them away.

 

It is so vividly pictured that that it's hard to imagine it wasn't derived from personal experience.

 

From The Moving Toyshop, a whodunnit by Edmund Crispin (set in 1938, but published in 1946).

 

 

Ooh, I have a copy and have read it!  Forgot the railway 'clip', so thanks

[monkeysarefun]

Maybe not QUITE the brief, being  an actual  model based on fantasy, in this case H.P. Lovecrafts works,

 

The Miskatonic Railroad has some wonderful touches, including the Thursday squid auction:

 

[The Johnster]

Maybe not QUITE the brief, being  an actual  model based on fantasy, in this case H.P. Lovecrafts works,

 

The Miskatonic Railroad has some wonderful touches, including the Thursday squid auction:

 

squid.jpg

 

I know Lovecraft wrote some weird stuff, but why is that motorised squid pushing those horses around?

[Andy Kirkham]

Here is one of my favourite passages - the opening of Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude - I often read this bit, although it is many years since I have read any of the rest of the book. No prizes for deducing where "Thames Lockdon" really is.

 

LONDON, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up though an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

 

The men and women imagine that they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

 

The area affected by this filthy inhalation actually extend beyond what we ordinarily think of as the suburbs - to towns, villages and districts as far as, or further than, twenty-five mile from the capital. Amongst these was Thames Lockdon, which lay on the river some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead line.

 

The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December. The engine carrying the 6.3 from Paddington steamed into Thames Lockdon at about a quarter past seven. It arrived up against buffers, for Thames Lockdon was a terminus, and it hissed furiously. That hiss, in the blackness of the station, might have been the sound of the crouching monster's last, exhausted, people-expelling breath in this riverside outpost of its daily influence and domain. Or it might, tonight, merely have been the engine hissing through its teeth against the cold.

 

Another book which has a small but crucial railway element is Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. It's clear that the author did a certain amount of railway research, but not quite enough: he describes a tragic accident taking place at Princes Risborough station, but the train supposedly involved was a service from Marylebone to Watlington