"While trains are often the setting for thrillers and action movies, train stations are more often the setting for what we could call inaction movies. A train station suggests journeys stalled, or ended, or yet to begin.
Whereas a train in motion – and particularly one entering a tunnel – has long symbolised sex, train stations have long hosted stories of sexual frustration. The main characters in Cairo Station (1958) and Closely Observed Trains (1966) seem excluded from the sexual experiences others access as easily as stepping aboard a departing train.
On film, the railway station can seem a place apart from the normal world. For the adulterers in Brief Encounter (1945) and Terminal Station (1953), two other films that are fraught with sexual frustration, it's not what they do inside the station that truly matters, but the impact it would have on the world outside, once they return to it."
