Trains of Thoughts

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

Climb aboard the illustrious Bernina Express for a festive ride through spectacular Alpine landscapes, taking in snow-covered peaks, architectural wonders, and majestic glaciers.

Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.

Mikado

Take a breathtaking train a ride through Nothern Quebec and Labrador on Canada’s first First Nations-owned railway. Come for the celebration of the power of independence, the crucial importance of aboriginal owned businesses and stay for the beauty of the northern landscape.

A Union Pacific production outlining the Big Boy locomotive and the history of the last great steam engine to rule the rails

Production for the Seaboard Railroad company outlining their railroad activities in the 1940s and heading into the 1950s

A production of the association of American Railroads outlining the wonders of America's rail system.

A documentary on the railroads of America produced by the Association of American Railroads

EB Films presents a documentary on the life of the freight train in America.

Film on the movement of material from the Chicago and Northwestern System.

Canadian Pacific I is made up of a series of slowly dissolved shots done from the same framing over several months. The camera frames a window with a railway yard in the foreground, a bay in the space behind it, and misty mountains in the extreme distance. Trains occasionally pass by in the foreground. Huge ships move across the bay. Blue mists hover over the mountain heads.

Canadian Pacific II is designed as a companion piece to Canadian Pacific I. Shot from a window two storeys higher and in the building adjacent to the artists’s studio of the previous year, one enters into a dream state… an involvement with a vocabulary of seeing and feeling by subtle transitions of the passage of time

This documentary introduces you to the entirety of the Amtrak service network, which spans from coast to coast, and border to border. From both trackside and onboard perspectives, you’ll see and survey the trains that so many ride for practical purposes and pure enjoyment. Along the way you’ll learn about Amtrak’s intriguing origin story, its on-going challenges, and insights on what’s yet to come.

The Channel Tunnel linking Britain with France is one of the seven wonders of the modern world but what did it take to build the longest undersea tunnel ever constructed? We hear from the men and women, who built this engineering marvel. Massive tunnel boring machines gnawed their way through rock and chalk, digging not one tunnel but three; two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. This was a project that would be privately financed; not a penny of public money would be spent on the tunnel. Business would have to put up all the money and take all the risks. This was also a project that was blighted by flood, fire, tragic loss of life and financial bust ups. Today, it stands as an engineering triumph and a testament to what can be achieved when two nations, Britain and France put aside their historic differences and work together.

In the 1930’s, the workers of the underground, headed by brigades of writers, are in charge to write in real time "the history of the Moscow Metro". Based on their narratives, partially unpublished, the film recounts the first lines construction of the most beautifiul underground in the world, in the light of this "big literary Utopia", stoped by the purges of 1937-38.

24 hodin pražského metra

Trace the history of Hitler's armored private train, a 15-car mobile headquarters boasting state-of-the-art communications and anti-aircraft cannons.

Métro, une ville sur les rails