I believe it started with The Railwayman, a movie starring Takakura Ken and Hirose Ryoko. It has Takakura Ken as a lifelong railway man living out the remaining of his working life as the station master of a remote train station in Hokkaido. The scenes of trains and station in the snow were beautiful, sometimes devastatingly so.
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| Hakodate Trains |
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| Hakodate Tram |
(Not to be mistaken with the recent Railway Man, a movie adapting the Lomax novel, about a forced labourer building the Thai-Burma Death railway.)
There is no denying there is something melancholic about an isolated little station right at the end of the line, in deep winter, under heavy snow. A reminder that even in the most remote outpost of the rail network, there are railwayman working to make sure of the smooth coming and going of the trains, even when it is likely there are only 2 or 3 arrivals every day.
These gleaming workhorses steel themselves for the elements ahead,
only to come in from the cold caked in what looks like sugar frosting and icing.
Nothing stake the claims for all humanity more clearly than a pair of parallel shining rail in bleak landscape of the wilderness. It says in no uncertain term that we are here, and here to stay.
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| Koiwai |
The first steam-powered locomotive engine in the USA was the English-built "Stourbridge Lion". Even from way back, people see these trains as lions. So, here are more Lions in Winter.
At least one French man must have been awe-inspired by one of these Lion. He went on to write the Snow Piercer. The graphic novel is set after a catastrophic war which sent the whole world into eternal winter. The last survival earthlings are now living in a train a thousand-carriages long.
It is ultimately a tale of class struggle, with our starving hero making his way from the impovished tail-end of the train up to the front end, where the privileged class party through the end of the world.
The graphic novel came out in the 1980s, and has recently been given a Hollywood make-over. I don't think it has been released in the US as of this writing, but the audience in China got to see in first, probably on the strenght of it having a asian (Korean to be more specific) director. From reviews coming out of China, it was rather well-received, critically and box-office-wise.
From reports on the internet, the class-struggle theme has been toned down to give way to more action.
Incidentally, the lead in Snow Piercer is one Chris Evans, better known as Captain America, starring now in The Winter Soldier.
I would like to report that my SAF army-issued Gortex military boots survived one of the harshest winter in Japan.
Only for the sole to come unstucked from the main body in the warmer weather of Taipei.
