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The Railway Children: the book vs. the movie

The Railway Children (1970) — Lionel Jeffries' film, with Jenny Agutter as Bobbie · The Railway Children (2000) — the Masterpiece TV film — Jenny Agutter returns, now as Mother · The Railway Children Return (2022) — a Second World War sequel, not this story

Read first, or watch first?

Read first if you can. The engine of this book is a question — where is Father? — and the film answers it on your face in the first twenty minutes; the platform scene at the end cannot be unspoiled once seen. There's also a practical wrinkle in the US: the 1970 film, which is the one to want, has no clean American release, while the two easiest to find on Amazon are the 2000 Masterpiece version and a 2022 sequel that isn't this story at all. So book first is both the better order and the simpler one. When you do track down Jeffries' film, watch it together — it is faithful enough that it plays as a reunion rather than a correction.

What the movie changed

The story moved to Yorkshire

Nesbit never names the county. Her own railway was the line near Grove Park in south-east London, which she walked and watched. Jeffries shot on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway, and his Yorkshire — Oxenhope, Haworth, Mytholmes Tunnel — is now where nearly everyone pictures the book. You can buy a ticket and stand on that platform, which is a thing the book can't offer.

The camera follows Bobbie

The novel divides itself fairly evenly between the three of them, and Peter in particular gets whole chapters of his own. The film tilts hard toward Bobbie, and Jenny Agutter's performance turns it into something closer to a coming-of-age story. Peter and Phyllis end up a step behind her.

The curtain call

Jeffries ends with the entire cast stepping out in front of a decorated engine to take a bow, Bobbie holding up a slate reading 'The End'. Nesbit's last chapter is called 'The End' too, and it does the opposite: the narrator stops at the door and refuses to follow the family inside.

How little else changed

Jeffries borrowed the novel from his thirteen-year-old daughter, bought the film rights for £300, wrote the screenplay himself, and said he had kept to the story because doing anything else would be an imposition. Set that beside what the movies did to Oz or Doctor Dolittle and it's close to unheard of.

What only the book has

Nesbit's narrator

She never leaves you alone. She teases the children, apologises for digressing, argues with you about what ought to happen next, and drops in asides like 'the Gentle Reader may perhaps have suffered from this difficulty.' At the very end she declines to open the door and follow the family in, because they are not wanted there just now. Half the book's warmth lives in that voice, and film has no equipment for it.

Mr Szczepansky's whole story

The Russian they find collapsed at the station wrote a book about how poor people actually lived, and was sent to Siberia in a chain gang for it. He escaped by volunteering as a soldier and deserting, and for years had no idea whether his wife and children were alive. It is the gravest material in the book and the adaptations can only gesture at it.

The birthday that nearly goes wrong

The children beg presents for Perks from every shop in the village, and he very nearly refuses the lot, because a porter's pride will not take what looks like charity. Nesbit spends a whole chapter working out the difference between a gift and a handout, and lets Perks be right to be angry. The films keep the birthday and drop the argument.

The ordinary days

Peter raiding the station coal heap and calling it a mine. The barge fire. The paper chase. The endless business of being cold and hungry and inventing something to do about it. The rescues land the way they do because the book has spent so long on the days when nothing happens.

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