One of the most enduring cinema images is the greeting and sendoff on the train platform. Hellos, goodbyes, tearful separations, good riddances, welcoming of the troops and the mad dashes of commuters all have taken place at train stations. Unlike airline food, trains run the gamut from five star dining to fast food. Jumping in front of a train is a time honored, if nasty, method of suicide. In 1935, one of film's most tragic heroine's, Greta Garbo, made perhaps the most famous lethal leap.
Trains inspire filmmakers' inventiveness as well.
Here are three unique dissolve shots from Powell and Pressburger, Hitchcock again, and Francis Ford Coppola that inspire three very different emotions in the viewer. There are very few things that can create a sense of helplessness than the thought of a runaway train. Fugitives from the law often use trains to make their getaways - that's what Cary Grant was doing in that earlier clip from North by Northwest. Here's an earlier Hitchcock flick where another innocent man makes a run for it. An even blacker period in world history, the Holocaust, paints the train's darkest image.