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Trains have featured in dozens of books and films. In the early days of steam in France back in the late 1800s Emile Zola, the French novelist, used images of trains extensively in his novel "La Bête Humaine". Leo Tolstoy's great novel "Anna Karenina" also features trains – the heroine eventually throwing herself under one at the station in Moscow. Many of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries (written by Arthur Conan Doyle) featured Holmes and his sidekick Dr Watson sitting on trains – Holmes lived in Baker Street, near the station.
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For children "Paddington Bear" was, of course, found at . . . well, Paddington; Edith Nesbit's 1906 novel "The Railway Children" features a family forced to move to the country because of the father's wrongful imprisonment, and they spend their time around the local village railway station and its characters. It was also made into a film on several occasions. And more recently "Thomas the Tank Engine" was an enormous success, spurning not only books and TV series but also models.
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Enid Blyton's Famous Five also had an adventure involving trains running in seemingly disused tunnels in "Five go to Mystery Moor" and more recently the Hogwarts Express ran in the "Harry Potter" series of books by J K Rowling; and "The Polar Express", an animated film adapted from a book by Chris Van Allsburg was a huge success.
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On the big screen who can forget Agatha Christie"s "Murder on the Orient Express" (originally, of course, a novel), starring Albert Finney, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkis – in fact it might be easier to tell you who was not in it ! Sean Connery obviously enjoyed acting on trains as he starred as James Bond on the Orient Express on his way back to London from Istanbul in "From Russia with Love". In other films Frank Sinatra starred in the wartime escape film "Von Ryan's Express"; Michael Crichton wrote and directed "The First Great Train Robbery" in 1969, starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down. A film with almost the same title had been made as far back as 1903 in America. and a couple of disaster movies included "The Cassandra Crossing" (1976 – Richard Harris, Sophia Loren); "Avalanche Express" (1979 – Robert Shaw, Lee Marvin, Linda Evans); and "The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3".
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Alfred Hitchcock got in on the railway act in 1938 with "The Lady Vanishes" starring Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave; and in 1938 Georges Simenon published his novel "The Man who Watched Trains go by" about Kees Popinga whose life is turned upside down before he catches the first train he can to Amsterdam . . . to commit murder ! In 1945 Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard fell in love in a railway station in "Brief Encounter"; and "Strangers on a Train" in 1951 had two characters who met on a train and decided to swap murders they both wanted committed, a story that was revived in Danny de Vito's 1987 film "Throw Mamma from the Train".
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