There is something about train travel that triggers the poetic muse. Perhaps it is the mesmerising rhythm of the train’s motion. Or maybe the onomatopoeic sounds—the chug-chug of the engine and clackety-clack of carriage wheels moving over the rails, somewhat like the percussion of the mridangam and ghatam in Carnatic music. It might even be the dream-like passage of scenery outside the window.
My favourite train poem is W H Auden’s Night Mail, penned in 1936 for a documentary on the train carrying mail only from London to Aberdeen. The poet has marvellously syncopated the rhythms in the poem to that of the train. Starting slowly with “This is the Night Mail crossing the border,/Bringing the cheque and the postal order”, he goes on to the huffing and puffing of the train climbing a gradient with “Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,/Snorting noisily as she passes/Silent miles of wind-bent grasses”. As the train picks up speed on the downslope, the poem also becomes more staccato in rhythm, “Letters of thanks, letters from banks,/Letters from the girl and the boy” and, finally, as the train slows down near its destination, the poem also adopts a sedate tone: “Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh/Asleep in granite Aberdeeen”.
Five years later, across the Atlantic came another musical tribute to the rhythm of trains in the form of Chatanooga Choo Choo, a song that was rendered by one of the greatest big bands of pre-War USA, Glen Miller and His Orchestra. From 1880, most trains bound for America’s South passed through the southeastern Tennessee city of Chattanooga. In the song, Miller has frequently used wind instruments to imitate the tooting of a locomotive’s whistle. And here are a part of the relevant lyrics: “When you hear the whistle blowin’ eight to the bar/Then you know that Tennessee is not very far/Shovel all the coal in/Gotta keep it rollin’/Woo, woo, Chattanooga there you are.” The song travelled fast throughout the circles of Europe during World War II. Unfortunately, Miller is supposed to have perished on December 15, 1944, when a plane carrying him from England to France disappeared over the English Channel.
India was among the first countries to induct rail transport as also start movie production. It was just a matter of time before train visuals and sounds became a popular ingredient of our films. Perhaps, the most memorable “train song” of Indian cinema is Toofan Mail from the movie Jawab (1942). Sung melodiously by the nightingale of Bengali Cinema, Kanan Devi, the song is a tribute to one of the most famous and fastest passenger trains then which plied between Howrah and Delhi. Kamal Prasanna Dasgupta elegantly incorporated the chug-chug of the engine and its whistling into the background score, while Pandit Madhur’s lyrics (Duniya ye duniya, Toofan Mail) draw a wonderful parallel between a train journey and life’s passage.