Trains in Movies: Bad Things Will Happen

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One of the most anticipated movies of the year, The Girl on the Train, is now in theaters. Yahoo Movies couldn’t help but realize that trains in films are harbingers of bad times to come. After careful, exhaustive examination over the course of at least an hour, we determined that there are four categories of bad stuff going down on the tracks.

1) You meet bad people on trains.

Strangers on a Train leads to murder, Harry Potter runs into Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, Steven Seagal runs into a bad plot and terrorists in Under Siege 2, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor run into murderers in Silver Streak. In North by Northwest, Cary Grant meets the sneaky Eva Marie Saint on the train.

2) You get robbed on a train.

The Great Train Robbery, both silent and 1970s, spells it out for you; The Train is about a robbery; in the train scene in Fast Five, Dom and the gang are stealing — you’ll never guess it — cars! Trading Places has a train robbery, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has a beautiful one.

3) You get stuck on trains.

Runaway Train (not the Soul Asylum song), Unstoppable, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and Snowpiercer; at some point in all of those movies, people are stuck on a train.

4) You die (or come close to it) on trains.

In Murder on the Orient Express, someone dies. InCaptain America, Bucky dies. The General and Throw Momma From the Train see people nearly die. This category also has a hefty James Bond subsection. Basically, if 007 is hopping on your train, you should hop off. Skyfall, From Russia with Love, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Spectre, and even more, I’m sure, fall under this category.

So there you go. Trains in movies always have something bad going on. And don’t bring up Thomas and the Magic Railroad. Those are clearly human souls condemned to take the form of Industrial Age machinery for crimes they have committed in their lives.

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