Top Ten- Movies on a Train

I have never taken the train for a long trip just trains in the city for local stuff.  I think it makes a great setting for a movie because you are locked down in a location which limits what you can do on board.  Basically you are stuck in a moving can on wheels that serves drinks.    Here are some of the best.

In New York, armed men hijack a subway car and demand a ransom for the passengers. Even if it's paid, how could they get away? Awesome cast with Robert Shaw as the lead bad guy and everyman guy Walter Mathua as the negotiator.

With an unmanned, half-mile-long freight train heading toward a city, a veteran engineer and a young conductor race against the clock to prevent a catastrophe.  Denzel is great in anything and the late, great director Tony Scott did a fantastic job of keeping you on the edge of your seat while these guys try to corral this runaway locomotive.

Two escaped convicts and a female railway worker find themselves trapped on a train with no brakes and nobody driving.  This is probably is the best critically received movie Cannon Productions ever released as it was quite different compared to all their Norris and Bronson movies.  

A woman secretly witnesses the murder of her blind date for the evening by a top Mafia boss. She immediately goes into hiding without informing the authorities. When they finally catch up with her, she is unwilling to testify to what she has seen, but the Mafia is on her trail. Accompanied by a deputy district attorney, the woman boards a train traveling through a remote part of Canada. The Mafia knows him but they have never seen her.  Come back Gene Hackman!  

This is 007’s second movie and it is not on the train long but all these scenes are pivotal to the plot.  Bad guy Robert Shaw leads Sean Connery’s Bond to believe he is a fellow agent but 007 is way too smart for that and this leads to a great confrontation on the train.

Mercenaries travel to the Congo across deadly terrain and battle arch enemies in route to rescue $25 million in uncut diamonds.  Rod Taylor and Jim Brown make a great team in this action flick from 1968.  These two get a little more than they bargained for in the end.  Love that poster!

An anthropologist discovers a frozen monster in Manchuria and puts it on board a Trans-Siberian train to get it to Europe.  Unfortunately the train does not have freezer cars and the monster thaws out and wreaks havoc on the train.  Great cast with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee working together in this movie and then Telly Savalas hopes on board later to help out.  This is a Spanish production so this just has that whole spaghetti western feel to it.  Yes, I know spaghetti is Italian.  This horror movie is a lot of fun.

Ex-Navy Seal and current cook Casey Ryback(Steven Seagal) is on vacation with his niece and takes the train to reach his destination.  Unfortunately for him or luckily for us there are terrorists on board to use the train as a mobile headquarters to hijack a top secret satellite that has destructive capabilities.  A very fun action movie as Seagal makes his way all over the train and takes out the terrorists one by one.  Some cool trivia here is that Gary Busey was a villain in the first movie and was set to return to the sequel but he and Seagal did not get along so bye-bye Busey.

On a long distance train trip, a man finds romance but also finds himself in danger of being killed, or at least thrown off the train.  This is a great action comedy with a terrific cast of Gene Wilder, the late Richard Pryor, and the late Jill Clayburgh.  Also be on the lookout for henchman Richard Kiel (Jaws from the Bond series).

A masked killer targets college kids responsible for a prank that wrong years earlier.  He gets them all isolated on a train while they celebrate New Year’s Eve with a costume party so this lets the killer move around easier and change costumes. Not the best among the 80s slasher movies but not bad either.