But, That Train Keeps a Rollin’ . . .

Horses, trains, planes, trucks, cars, and everything in between. . . Americans are a mobile people always on the go. And, we value speed, power, movement, action, endurance—qualities that will get us where we want to go, even if we don’t know what to do when we get there. Small wonder we mythologize and romanticize vehicles and modes of transportation in our popular culture, especially in the movies. The exception may be air travel. After a decade of airport security checks, pat-downs, and wand probes, combined with the airlines’ overall disdain for their customers, cinematic adventures in airplanes have a negative connotation. They are generally allegories for terrorism (Snakes on a Plane), symbols of purgatory (The Langoliers), or metaphors for various states of mental breakdown (Flightplan).

Though trains have fallen out of favor as the preferred mode of cross-country travel, and the long-haul trucking industry has hijacked—pardon the pun—much business from the railroads, trains still make a potent subject matter for the movies. Over the holiday weekend, I watched Unstoppable on the big screen in a packed theater, where most members in the audience thoroughly enjoyed the tense scenes of near misses and close calls. The film prompted me to recall other movies in which trains are the primary setting or central focus of the narrative because I thought it would make a fun topic for today’s post. Alas, after poking around on the Web to see how Unstoppable fared with reviewers, I discovered this was not an original thought on my part. Apparently, the film inspired other bloggers to list movies about trains. Oh, well, at least my list goes back to the very beginning of cinema history.

In no particular order, this is my list of favorite films in which most of the story is set on a train or involves a train. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, and it does not include movies with only one key sequence on a train (i.e. Palm Beach Story).  Feel free to add a comment with your own favorites and why they stand out for you.

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