Murder Mysteries and Trains

One of Dreamstone Productions' murder mysteries at Sheringham's North Norfolk Railway

Why do people love murders on trains - because there is no getting away from it, they do? Murders and trains exist in our psyche, almost as intrinsically bound together as Sherlock Holmes and deductive reasoning.

From Conan Doyle's The Story of the Lost Special to Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, trains have featured in the great murder mystery stories we all know, and go back to again and again - these days often on TV, in film or on stage.

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in the 20th Century Fox film version of Murder on the Orient Express (2017).

Why is this? Let us look at it culturally. Certainly, while Conan Doyle was writing his Sherlock Holmes stories for the Strand Magazine, the railways were transforming English society (there is an excellent article about Holmes and trains here). It is hard for us to imagine a time when the choice for a journey was either train or horse and carriage - nor how much the railways must have transformed people's lives. It is inevitable that they were bound to have an impact on what people thought about, and the way they thought. Of course, the great writers of the day used trains as a source of inspiration (Dickens also writes about the building of the railways in many of his novels).

A murder in the ticket office - even the stops can be dangerous places!

Writing today in 2026 though, there is no arguing that times have changed. Our modern audience wants to experience the nostalgia of bygone age - to hark back to a time when trains had names and the station-master felt like an old friend who waved you off on your way to work each morning.

Also, travel itself is inherently romantic. Train travel is a spatial parenthesis between departure and destination; a liminal space where anything can happen. Items (and people!) can go missing; things can change en route into other things; the presumed destination can end up being 'some other place'. In other words - on a train, magic can happen. This makes a train journey a great focus and theme for a murder mystery adventure.

Then there is time. It is worth mentioning here that the advent of train travel radically changed society's relationship with time - up until 1840, time had been a regional construct, depending on local sundials which varied due to latitude and time of year.

With the advent of the Great Western Railway in 1840, Standardised British Time was introduced.

Agatha Christie's ABC Murders is a good example of the prominence of train-related time in society consciousness at the time she was writing.

Now as a writer, travel and time are dynamite. Add to a mysterious journey a critical time limit - the gangsters have to transfer their bootleg goods to the next station before the police catch up with them; the soldier has to reach the coast to warn everyone, before the bomb only he knows about, goes off; the man has to reach his lover before she finds out about his affair - and you have a high-stakes story indeed!

I love writing murder mysteries for an audience that truly loves to immerse itself in a past culture that can lead them anywhere - forwards, or backwards, or even around in circles! And train journeys are some of the best places to do it!

Dreamstone Productions at the North Norfolk Railway

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Dreamstone Productions create and perform immersive Murder Mysteries for the North Norfolk Railway and the Mid-Norfolk Railway in Norfolk. Please visit the relevant website for more information.

Donna K. Triggs is an actress, producer, writer and director. Read more about her at www.donnaktriggs.com