Trains on Film: Doctor Zhivago and the great railway films

Doctor Zhivago: a train across revolutionary Russia

Boris Pasternak’s novel could not be published in the Soviet Union. The manuscript reached the Milan publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who brought it out in Italy in 1957, and the following year Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which the Soviet authorities pressed him to decline. Readers in his own country had to wait until 1988.

David Lean, fresh from Lawrence of Arabia, turned the book into a sweeping film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the producer Carlo Ponti, from a screenplay by Robert Bolt. Omar Sharif plays Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet; Julie Christie is Lara; Geraldine Chaplin is Tonya, his wife; Rod Steiger is the worldly Komarovsky; Alec Guinness is Yevgraf, Zhivago’s half-brother; and Tom Courtenay is Pasha, Lara’s idealistic husband, who returns from the war as the feared revolutionary commander Strelnikov.

The railway is the spine of the film. With Moscow cold and hungry after the Revolution, Zhivago, Tonya and her family leave for the family estate at Varykino in the Urals, packed into a crowded, heavily guarded train. The journey takes them through country where the Red and White armies are fighting. When the train halts beside Strelnikov’s armoured train, Zhivago steps down, is seized, and is brought before the commander, whom he recognises as Pasha. Strelnikov lets him go back to his train, and the journey into the snow goes on.

What stays with you is the scale: the endless white plains slipping past the open wagon door, the steam and the frost, and a whole society on the move. Few films have made a train journey feel so much like history itself.

Making Zhivago: Russia in Spain, Finland and Canada

The film was made mainly in Spain. At the C.E.A. Studios near Madrid, the production designer John Box and his team spent months building Moscow as it was from 1905 to 1920, with a half-mile street, tramlines and a replica of the Kremlin. Spain’s mild winter brought no snow, so the crew created their winters with white paint, plaster dust and white plastic sheeting, and the actors played winter scenes in Russian furs in the heat of the Spanish summer.

The estate at Varykino was filmed at Candilichera, in the province of Soria. For the railway, Box’s crew laid new track in the mountains north of Madrid; further railway scenes and the Siberian exteriors were shot in Finland, and a second unit filmed the train’s mountain journeys in the Canadian Rockies, with the cooperation of Finnish State Railways and the Canadian Pacific Railway.

At the 38th Academy Awards, the film won five Oscars from ten nominations: Robert Bolt for the screenplay, Freddie Young for colour cinematography, John Box and Terence Marsh, with Dario Simoni, for art direction, Phyllis Dalton for costume design, and Maurice Jarre for the score, with its famous Lara’s Theme. Best Picture that year went to The Sound of Music. For Young, it was the second of three Oscars for cinematography, all won on films by David Lean: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter.

The General (1926)

Buster Keaton’s silent masterpiece, which he directed with Clyde Bruckman, is inspired by the Great Locomotive Chase of the American Civil War. Keaton plays an engine driver whose two loves are his locomotive, the General, and the girl he hopes to marry, and when Union raiders steal both, he gives chase alone.

Almost everything you see is real. Keaton filmed in Oregon, around Cottage Grove, and for the climax his crew built a trestle bridge over the Row River and sent a real locomotive crashing through it into the water: one of the most expensive single shots of the silent era. Keaton’s stunts on the moving engine still take your breath away.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Alfred Hitchcock’s witty thriller, made in Britain for Gainsborough Pictures, is set almost entirely aboard a train crossing Europe. Margaret Lockwood plays a young Englishwoman who befriends an elderly governess, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), only for her to vanish, while the other passengers insist she was never there. Michael Redgrave is the musicologist who helps her search the carriages.

The screenplay, by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, comes from Ethel Lina White’s novel The Wheel Spins (1936). It is a perfect introduction to Hitchcock: suspense, comedy and a train you will never forget. We could not find an official trailer from the film’s rights holders online, so watch out for screenings at your local repertory cinema.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Two men meet by chance in a train compartment. One, a tennis player (Farley Granger), wants to be free of his wife; the other, Bruno (Robert Walker), has a proposal: each will commit the other’s murder, and with no motive, neither will be caught.

Hitchcock made the film for Warner Bros. from Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, published in 1950, with a screenplay credited to Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde. The runaway carousel at the climax was added for the film. There is no official trailer online, but the opening, two pairs of shoes walking to the same train, is cinema at its purest.

Brief Encounter (1945)

Twenty years before Zhivago, David Lean made the most British of railway love stories. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard play two married strangers who meet in a station refreshment room and fall quietly, hopelessly in love over a series of Thursday afternoons, to the sound of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and the expresses roaring through.

The film comes from Noël Coward’s one-act play Still Life. The station scenes were filmed at Carnforth in Lancashire, where the restored station now has a heritage centre, with a film exhibition, and a refreshment room recreated in the film’s honour: a lovely stop for any railway pilgrim.

North by Northwest (1959)

Mistaken for a spy, Cary Grant’s advertising man Roger Thornhill flees New York on the Twentieth Century Limited, the luxury overnight express to Chicago, and in its dining car meets the cool, mysterious Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). Their flirtation over dinner and the night in her sleeping compartment are Hitchcock at his most playful.

The chase that follows takes in the crop-duster and Mount Rushmore, but the train has the last word, in one of the cheekiest final shots in cinema.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Chicago, 1929. Two jazz musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness a gangland killing and escape the only way they can: disguised as women, in an all-girl band travelling by overnight train to Florida, where Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane sings and plays the ukulele. The midnight party in the sleeping-car berths is one of the funniest scenes Billy Wilder ever filmed.

The band’s Florida hotel was played by the Hotel del Coronado, near San Diego in California,.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974 and 2017)

Agatha Christie’s novel of 1934 sets Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express, stopped by a snowdrift in the Balkans, with a dead man in his compartment and a carriage full of suspects. Sidney Lumet’s 1974 film, with Albert Finney as Poirot and an all-star cast, received six Oscar nominations, and Ingrid Bergman won Best Supporting Actress.

Kenneth Branagh directed a new version in 2017 and played Poirot himself, with a splendid recreation of the train. Watch both, then read the real story of the Orient Express, which once ran through Belgrade on its way to Istanbul, in our long read.

The real Orient Express: our story →

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

John Hughes’s Thanksgiving comedy throws a buttoned-up advertising executive (Steve Martin) together with a cheerful, chaotic shower-curtain-ring salesman (John Candy) on the journey home to Chicago, by every means of transport that can go wrong. The train breaks down in the middle of a field, naturally. Funny and unexpectedly moving, it is the film for anyone who has ever missed a connection.

The Polar Express (2004)

On Christmas Eve, a boy who has begun to doubt lies awake listening for sleigh bells, and instead a great steam train draws up outside his house, bound for the North Pole. Robert Zemeckis made the film from Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book, with Tom Hanks playing several roles, among them the conductor, in an animated film made with performance capture. For many families it is now as much a part of Christmas as the tree.

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Wes Anderson sends three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) on a train journey across India, in search of each other and of their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas. The train itself, all painted panels and tiny compartments, is as carefully designed as anything in Anderson’s films.

Much of it was filmed in Rajasthan, around Jodhpur and Udaipur, and it had its premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2007.

Unstoppable (2010)

Tony Scott’s last film sends a veteran engineer (Denzel Washington) and a young conductor (Chris Pine) after a runaway freight train loaded with hazardous chemicals. It was inspired by a real incident in Ohio in May 2001, when a CSX freight train ran for some 66 miles with no one at the controls before a crew caught it and brought it to a stop. Pure, thundering suspense.

Snowpiercer (2013)

In Bong Joon-ho’s first English-language film, the last survivors of a frozen Earth circle the globe on a single, endless train: the poor crammed into the tail, the privileged living in luxury at the front. Chris Evans leads the uprising from the back, carriage by carriage; Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-ho, John Hurt and Octavia Spencer are unforgettable on the way.

The story comes from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, first published in 1982. The train was built on gimbals on the soundstages of Barrandov Studios in Prague, so that every carriage sways as you watch.

Chennai Express (2013)

Rohit Shetty’s action comedy sends Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul south to scatter his grandfather’s ashes at Rameswaram, and onto the Chennai Express, where he meets Deepika Padukone’s Meenamma, who is fleeing an arranged marriage. What follows is a riot of chases, songs and romance across southern India, ending with the “Lungi Dance”, a tribute to Rajinikanth. It became the highest-grossing Indian film of its time.

Our Mumbai guide covers the city of Bollywood, its studios and Shah Rukh Khan’s story.

The ULTIMATE Mumbai City Guide →

Train to Busan (2016)

Yeon Sang-ho’s South Korean thriller puts a workaholic father (Gong Yoo) and his young daughter on a KTX express from Seoul to Busan just as a zombie outbreak sweeps the country. What follows, carriage by carriage, is terrifying, exciting and surprisingly tender. It had its premiere in the Midnight Screenings at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016.

Bullet Train (2022)

David Leitch’s riotous action comedy puts Brad Pitt’s unlucky assassin, Ladybug, aboard a Shinkansen racing from Tokyo to Kyoto, along with a carriage-load of rival killers who all seem to be after the same briefcase. It is based on Kōtarō Isaka’s novel Maria Beetle, published in English as Bullet Train. Pure entertainment, and the best advertisement yet for Japan’s high-speed trains.

Our advice

Watch Doctor Zhivago on the biggest screen you can find: it was made for the cinema, and repertory cinemas and festivals still show it. Then pair a film with a journey. See Brief Encounter, then take tea at Carnforth; watch Murder on the Orient Express before a night on the rails across Europe; and if you are heading between Belgrade and Budapest, let the Danube plains do the rest.

Over to you. Which railway film do you love most, and which scene would you put on the list? Tell us below or in our forum: we read every message, and the best suggestions will join this page.

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