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Study 032 - The Trains (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-23 19:17:29
Imported:
2026-06
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Robert Aickman month goes off the rails with The Trains - climb aboard!

Special thanks to reader Greig Johnson! Grab something from his Etsy page now!

Next up: an Extra Credit episode on the Japanese film Attack of the Mushroom People (otherwise known as Matango)!

Comments

Rob_Hellfire_Graves (Cult organ donor, wrestler, poet & Satanic Reverend)

Classic Aickman, potentially bisexual female protagonists (they were very happy to share a bed even before the kiss), chauvinistic men and Freudian imagery of trains entering tunnels. When I saw Alex Garland's ‘Men’ last year it gave me the same vibes as this and on re-reading I imagined all characters except the protagonists to have Rory Kinnear’s face. Though Vincent Price works too for Roper as you guys said, as I get big House of Usher vibes from the house constantly shaking. I think it’s likely the Roper men had been ‘collecting’ women for decades on the first floor and we can guess what happened to Mimi left alone with him, Roper by name roper by nature. As for the secret of the trains and the pockets full of tickets I’ve no idea, the sound of the train that seems to leave the tracks must mean something. Maybe they sacrifice women to the train god of the valley?! Or it’s as simple as, as a lover of canal boats this is what Aickman thought of train lovers. For next year’s Aickman month I loved to hear ‘The Next Glade’ and ‘Growing Boys’. Thanks for a great month, now I'm ready to March for Draculas.

Richard Horsman

Had an Aickmanesque experience listening to this one. I’ve read The Trains twice, once only a few days ago. Listening to this episode, there were multiple beats that I simply did not remember, even though I was sure I was pretty engaged while reading it. I feel like I now need to go back and check it a third time. Excited for the Matango episode! It’s streaming on the Criterion Channel, if anyone has been looking for a reason to do their trial offer. They have it as part of a huge Ishiro Honda collection, including all of his Godzilla films, as well as lesser known stuff like The Mysterians. That’s here in the US, not sure whether they have it in other geographies.

Cacodaemoniacal

Woman as cattle, or a prey animal within her own species. yay. This seems like an alternate take on another of Aickman's stories: "Hand in Glove" from "Compulsory Games" wherein two women take a short trip together, run afoul of men, and rue the day.

Mr. Splitfoot

I was waiting and waiting for the Lying Vincent Price voice once Chad brought him up. Alas, it was not to be.

Camshaft

Can someone please justify to me why this month wasn’t called, “Stains, Trains, and Aick-omobiles”???

It's a Ghost.

Chad, I too thought Mimi’s question about the rafters was odd/random, but then I went back and saw where Roper had told Mimi and Margaret, “Now Beech will take you to your room. The Rafters Room, Beech,” so, of course they had expected to find rafters in the room and were surprised when there weren’t any visible.

It's a Ghost.

I loved the tickets in Mimi’s pockets; it’s so perfectly Aickman strange.

Jim Cannon

That may be it, Chad, I am not reading along with these and the summaries may not be conveying how good the stories actually are. I don't seem to have that problem with any other authors though... That said, this one sounds better than the last one. Margaret may be the secondary protagonist in the story, but she's still in the story. And she has a knife! I have no doubt those kids will escape somehow, though I doubt a passing train will help. I also don't think there's anything supernatural going on. Just some "elevated folk horror" transpiring.

Jeremy Impson

To be honest, mid-40s *is* young for Vincent Price

It's a Ghost.

When Mimi asked what’s wrong with the Quiet Valley, the creepy guy at the Guest House said, “Nothing so long as you stay, sister. Just nothing at all.” Which I suspect means no one can leave the Quiet Valley. They are all trapped. The creepy guy at the Guest House said that none of the locals visited, and although he has been to New York before, he now lives at the guest house; Beech did not leave after Miss Roper’s death; after her experience with Wendley, Mimi now knows they are truly trapped; and perhaps even Wendley is trapped, and the secret his aunt was keeping from him was the secret of how to escape the Quiet Valley. Maybe this is something Wendley communicated to Mimi, “We’re all trapped, and the secret of how to escape died with my aunt.” Also, the locals call it “the Quiet Valley,” which, considering all the loud trains, just shows they haven’t ever been there before.

Alan Ricks

You guys ended with a much more upbeat outlook then I had when I read this a while back. I remember thinking that they have now become the trapped aunt and while be mindlessly waved at by passing trains for years like she did until they break down and kill themselves like she did. Honestly like your interpretation that it wasn’t a foreshadowed set in stone outcome and they could break out and flee the valley more than mine. I loved the story.

Shadavid

Some youth hostels were stately homes. I stayed in one on the shores of Loch Lomond in the early 70s and another in Derbyshire in the noughties. Snobs, eh?

Matt Bustin

My view of the ending was that the protagonists were doomed to being trapped (possibly) forever. The earlier reference to a young woman waving from the window to the trains, which couldn’t be the aunt as she was too old, I took to mean the occupants of the house were serial killers or something more witch like. I almost feel like there is a Lovecraftian body swap element where the original rail line builder and aunt are actually able to takeover the bodies of younger people. The host of the house is old fashioned in his ways and shows the same obsession with trains as his (supposedly) deceased relative and it would explain his moving into the house. As with a lot of Aickman, the explanation appears to be there but you can’t quite put your finger on it, which makes the whole thing more unsettling.

Cacodaemoniacal

I always decide that having a bloody shirt and a knife will help them. I guess that's why I think it's partially about how he sees each generation of women as having it a bit better.

Stewart

I tried reading Aickman after your praise at the end, because Chad hit on what always failed to impress me about him: his stories feel like he always builds dread or a sense of the weird, which is hard enough on its own, but rather than do the extraordinarily hard work of actually figuring out some clever supernatural mystery, he just goes "woooo, ambiguity," taking, at least for me, Lovecraft's "fear of the unknown maxim" too far. It's ironically the same reason I dislike the game Bloodborne, the storytelling strategy leaned too hard on mistaking an obscure clue based storytelling and an unwillingness to come up with an interesting answer for depth. I understand the appeal of letting your imagination run wild, but at a certain point it just gets annoying for me, and feels like the author couldn't come up with an ending either, and expects the reader to do the work. Aickman writes very well on a prose level, which keeps me engaged up until the end, but that just serves to annoy me more when the conclusion feels to me like a cop-out. So no more Aickman for me, I think, but I nonetheless appreciate Chris and Chad continuing to read them, in this case so I don't have to.

Aaron La Vene

Genuinely disturbing story and I really hate to be a negative Nancy vs ur optimism. But this SEEMS to be the inspiration for the “bent neck lady” in the show haunting of hill house. She has night terrors growing up of a hanged woman (bent neck) reaching out to her. Such as the dream of Margaret of the hanged lady turning into a terror and seeing her in person…. in the show…. Spoilers. It is revealed that She became the bent neck lady herself when she hung herself off the staircase. Just as Margaret… like the lady before her…. Was now waving to trains through a window….. I hate to say that I think this is foreshadowing and is why he didn’t try to break into the room. It’s not his first time locking a woman up there…. Hopefully she uses that knife well enough to save them! But man I really may just be tugging at strings but that was the first thought I had listening to this.

Jason of the K

Aickman operates on so many levels, I don't usually go for super deep meanings in this genre but he definitely encourages it. So my read is that the story is about how men view women and can't see distress even when she is waving a WHITE FLAG at them (the white flag being a near universal sign of surrender or distress when one man waves it at another). The women fall afoul of a predator in the wilderness and even though civilization, represented by the trains, is literally right outside, the men on the train see a woman waving a flag and assume it's a flirty bit of play and they NEVER once wonder if she is in trouble.

RebeccaR

Since she's young and it's England, it's quite possible that Margaret has never worn shorts because there hasn't been a hot summer during her lifetime. :D

RebeccaR

2 laughs-out-loud in the first 5 mins and that's not unusual -- that's why I love Chris & Chad's HP Strangeness. Thanks for being reliably cheery-up, guys

Pam Winkler

Man, I thought Beech was in love with Miss Roper.