GCSE Creative Writing: Using Trains and Railway Station( Bolton English Tuition)

Ticket To Ride: Creative Writing Inspiration from Trains and Railway Stations.

The train plunged into a tunnel.

The calm, monotonous voice was drowned. At the next table, a small one, sat Colonel Arbuthnot—alone. His gaze was fixed upon the back of Mary Debenham’s head. They were not sitting together. Yet it could easily have been managed. Why? Perhaps, Poirot thought, Mary Debenham had demurred. A governess learns to be careful. Appearances are important. A girl with her living to get has to be discreet. His glance shifted to the other side of the carriage.

( Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express)

Exercise One.

• Make a note of as many novels, stories, poems, plays and films involving trains or railway stations.
• Consider the mood of each and how the setting affects the ‘story’ of each text.  

Exercise Two.

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall and winter. ( Edith Wharton, The Triumph of the Night).

You are going to create a story around a railway station. The station can be real or imagined, modern or more ancient. Names are evocative and help propel your story’s mood and sense of purpose and adventure.

• What is your station called?
• Make some notes on the appearance and situation of the station as well as the type of facilities offered.
• Waiting rooms are useful for encounters or reflection.

Exercise Three.

Read these extracts for possible railway inspiration.  Make notes on their effects.

“Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two. Right!”

Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from engine. Train gone.

 “Mugby Junction!” said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler round his throat with both hands. “At past three o’clock of a tempestuous morning! So!” He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak to himself. Speaking to himself he spoke to a man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much alone.

 He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him.

 “Very well,” said he, yielding. “It signifies nothing to me to what quarter I turn my face.”

Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o’clock of a tempestuous morning, the traveller went where the weather drove him. (Dickens, Mugby Junction)

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

 ( Larkin, Whitsun Weddings)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

(Ezra Pound, In the Station of the Metro)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

(Edward Thomas, Adlestrop)

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

( Larkin, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel)