My fascination with trains began well before I realized that I wanted to be a writer. In fact, it was probably a train journey that first led me down the writing track. Bad pun aside, I did write my first poem after a train ride to Puri as a little girl. The poem was published in a magazine called Friends, not in circulation anymore. I still remember the first four lines:

If you are going to the sea

Please take me

For that’s the place

I’m longing to be.

I learnt much later that train journeys have provided fodder for many famous writers. One of my favourites, Agatha Christie, has written several murder mysteries that feature trains. 4.50 from Paddington is about a woman who witnesses a woman being strangled on a train that runs parallel to hers. The Murder on the Orient Express and The Mystery of the Blue Train are some of her other novels with trains in them.

Train also feature prominently on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. Then, there is the famous E Nesbit novel, The Railway Children and a thrilling climax on Ian’s Fleming’s From Russia With Love. More recently, there is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train where a woman witnesses an incident from the train that sets her off on a bizarre journey of her own. The delightful Harry Potter series is full of stations and train journeys much like Enid Blyton’s popular Malory Towers and St Clare’s books. Closer home, there is Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series. Shonar Kella for instance where Feluda and Topshe meet Jatayu who becomes a dear friend and goes on many adventures with them.

Two of my short stories published by Juggernaut Books feature trains as a backdrop to incidents in the lives of protagonists. In The Magazine Seller, a young woman meets a man selling magazines on the train she boards to get to university. In A Chance Encounter, two people in unhappy marriages are drawn to each other while travelling in the same train compartment. Click on the links to read them.

Do you have any favourite train stories to add to this list?