The Girl on the Train – and other express encounters in literature

Moira Redmond takes a journey through her favourite fiction written to the rhythm of the rails. Which train scenes make your heart beat faster?

The latest domestic thriller to grab attention, massive sales and a place at the top of the bestseller list is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – it’s a very English book, so it’s even more impressive that this debut novel has been hugely successful in the US as well.

There’s been much song and dance about it slipstreaming the success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but little about its debt to a long and venerable train trope in literature. The starting point is that a young woman gets the same train every day, and watches out for a house that backs on to the line. She imagines a life for the happy, good-looking couple in their garden, and looks for them obsessively twice a day, there and back. But what she sees begins to make her fear that something is going wrong. It’s a twisty thriller, with a lot going on – but who doesn’t feel a frisson at the thought of what you see out of a train window? From planes you see clouds, from boats you see seabirds, from cars everything streaks past too fast to notice. So plenty of authors have used that transitory moment of reflection on a train, when time seems to freeze as the landscape rushes by, to their advantage.

Who doesn’t feel a frisson at the thought of what you see out of a train window?

“It must be some curve if you can photograph the front part of the train from the back, it will look awfully dangerous.”

I pointed out to her that no one could possibly tell it had been taken from the back of the train. She looked at me pityingly. “I shall write underneath it. ‘Taken from the train. Engine going round a curve.’”

Related: The Girl on the Train: how Paula Hawkins wrote ‘the new Gone Girl’

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves …

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.

The train finally begins to slow and suddenly bright light floods the compartment. We can’t help it. Both Peeta and I run to the window to see what we’ve only seen on television, the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem. The cameras haven’t lied about its grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal … The people begin to point at us eagerly as they recognise a tribute train rolling into the city. I step away from the window, sickened by their excitement, knowing they can’t wait to watch us die.

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