Among forms of transport as settings for stories, trains seem the most popular. Rail travel may not have the speed or ‘glamour’ of air travel, or the well-heeled ambience of, say, a cruise ship, but it has its unique charm and mystique that lends itself well to stories.
And famous authors, from Agatha Christie to Ian Fleming, Graham Greene to JK Rowling and Khushwant Singh to Satyajit Ray have used it to great effect.
This may be because it is in trains that we are more likely to meet different kinds of people even in these days of ubiquitous air travel, and the period of the journey accords time enough for a story to develop, unlike in the latter. Air travel also does not allow for much conversation between characters. Road travel only allows a limited number of participants to figure, and sea travel never got over the sinking of the Titanic.
In trains, the sense of being in a sort of separate universe while not dislocated from the world we inhabit, unlike in air or sea journeys, contributes to its allure. Trains are also great settings for perplexing mysteries and insidious dangers.
Among the earliest mention of trains in major literary works may be Lewis Caroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass...” (1871), the sequel of “Alice in Wonderland”, where Alice, playing a gigantic game of chess in a pawn’s role, begins her journey by boarding a train where she meets an assortment of strange creatures.
Meanwhile, Phineas Fogg, in his circumnavigation of the world (in Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”, 1873) begins and ends his journey on trains, and also depends on them to carry him across India (from Bombay to Calcutta), and the US (from San Francisco to New York).
Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (1877) has a crucial episode at a station.
Sherlock Holmes made extensive use of trains but none of the mysteries he solved were set in trains, save to some extent “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans”, where the victim of a murder is found on railway tracks.
However, his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote two stories with railway themes - “The Lost Special” (1898) in which a whole train disappears and in “The Man with the Watches” (1898), where a man is found dead in a railway carriage with no identification but half a dozen timepieces.
No mention of railways in literature can be complete without the legendary Orient Express, which began its Paris-Istanbul service in 1883 and exemplified luxury and comfort at a time when travelling was still rough and dangerous.
Though operations stopped during the World Wars and the Istanbul terminus was dropped in 1977 (the truncated service itself ended in 2009), the train, which, in its heyday had three parallel routes across Europe, was the most celebrated way of traversing the continent. And it got its due.
Dr Van Helsing and his associates take the train when they chase Dracula back to his Transylvanian lair, and Agatha Christie gave Poirot to solve a particularly tough nut to crack in the “Murder on the Orient Express” (1934).
Finally, where would Harry Potter be without the Hogwarts Express?
Closer home, the first prominent work where trains feature is possibly Khushwant Singh’s first novel “Train to Pakistan” (1956). Satyajit Ray’s “Barin Bhowmik’s Ailment” also includes a train encounter, with a twist.
However, apart from a few examples here and there, Indian novels set on trains are few and far in between. The railways are yet to receive the attention they deserve from Indian authors.
(Vikas Datta is an Associate Editor at IANS. This column was published in an arrangement with IANS.)
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