Phantom rides and kisses in tunnels: the Victorian craze for train films

Trains and early films were made for each other. The train was the perfect spectacle to impress cinema’s first audiences with a sense of movement, power, speed and a frisson of danger. 

Railway companies realised the soft promotional power of film as early as 1895, giving permission to filmmakers to stage arrivals at stations, such as the Lumière brothers’ famous L’Arrivé d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895), or to photograph high-impact views of great express trains thundering by, like Empire State Express, filmed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, or Black Diamond Express by James White for Edison, both in 1896.

In 1897 the train was discovered to be a perfect view-making machine, as the ‘phantom ride’ was born, with Alexandre Promio’s Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer showing a receding view with the camera mounted on the back of the train as it pulled out of the station. Meanwhile, Biograph’s Haverstraw Tunnel mounted the camera on the cowcatcher, showing the journey going forwards.

Phantom rides could be varied in pace. They could be incredibly fast – dashing past the camera at speed – or show much more leisurely views, as if we were aboard, staring out of the window, watching the world go by. W.K.L. Dickson, formerly of the Edison company, but by 1897 with Biograph, was one of the great producers of train films. He negotiated with the London and North Western Railway Company to take a whole series of films in 1897 and 1898. Several of these survive and have been digitally restored to show the incredible quality achievable by his huge 68mm format camera. 

The Panoramic View of Conway Castle on the L. & N.W. Railway (1898) is a beautiful, hand-painted, slow-moving film along the North Wales coast. Much more dramatic is The Irish Mail Taking Up Water at Full Speed (1898), filmed from a train running alongside the express at furious speed and showing it scooping up water from a channel alongside the track. 

He made many more, including several showing trains carrying troops and panoramas of troop encampments during the Boer War. But his most inventive use of the train for filmmaking purposes was as a mobile studio for developing his film of the 1900 Grand National as the train sped towards London so he could have the film on screen at the Palace Theatre that same day.

Other British makers took advantage of the popularity of the form. Cecil Hepworth took several picturesque phantom rides in the south-west of England: View from an Engine Front from Barnstaple to Ilfracombe and the famous View from an Engine Front — Shilla Mill Tunnel and View from an Engine Front — Train Leaving Tunnel, which were later used to bookend G.A. Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899). 

Smith had already entered the world of the train film with his Train Entering Hove Station in imitation of the Lumière film, but in The Kiss in the Tunnel he made the first foray into the world of fiction film. In this we see the film of the train entering a tunnel and then a studio shot as if in the carriage, where we see Smith himself taking advantage of the blackout to kiss his wife (played by his actual wife, Laura Bayley). Then we see the train emerge from the tunnel into the light. This was so popular it was remade by the Bamforth company in a bawdier version and much copied around the world.

Robert Paul, the other great pioneer of film in Britain, likewise made many train films, from his Switchback Railway film in 1898 – the first of that subgenre so beloved of YouTubers – to suburban views showing the complex timetabling of slow and express trains traversing the capital. But for sheer Victorian eccentricity, it would be hard to beat his film of the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway – known as ‘Daddy Long Legs’ – a sea-going train carriage on stilts, filmed in 1897.

In these first few joyful and experimental years of filmmaking, every possible variation of views of trains or views from trains were tried – forwards, backwards, sideways, up and down. This really was film’s ‘age of the train’.

For more on panoramas and phantom rides see The Story of Victorian Film in the British Screen Stories series published by BFI Bloomsbury.