The best films about rail travel Do it yourself Most of Britain's heritage and tourist railways, from the Bodmin and Wenford in Cornwall to the Strathspey in the far north of Scotland, and its railway preservation groups, are represented by the Heritage Railway Association. Its website (heritagerailways.com) has details of everything from day trips and short breaks to courses in engine driving. The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Wes Anderson's quirky comedy-drama sharply divided audiences and critics, but it's a fine advertisement for luxury train travel in India. Three affluent American brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman), barely on speaking terms since their father's death, board the titular train as a journey of spiritual rediscovery. It's an emotional trip for three melancholy souls, unconsoled by wealth and even their absurdly exotic luggage. It looks ravishing, with stop-offs at a palace in Jodphur and the lakeside city of Udaipur. The Darjeeling Limited doesn't exist, but there are Indian trains offering comparable style and service, including the Royal Rajasthan on Wheels (royalrajasthanonwheels.com) and the Maharajas" Express (themaharajasexpressindia.com). The latter, which began as a joint venture between Indian railways and the tour operator Cox & Kings, has featured in Telegraph Travel. Several of the companies listed in our roundup of rail tour operators sell trips on Indian trains. Night Mail (1936) This 25-minute British documentary masterpiece tracks the journey of an overnight LMS mail train from London to Scotland. Produced by the GPO Film Unit, it boasts a remarkable array of talent: it's narrated by John Grierson and has music by Benjamin Britten and poetry from W H Auden, whose verse "This is the Night Mail crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order" cunningly suggests the sound of the steam train clattering along the tracks. Movingly, the film hints at how letters bring people separated by distance closer together. You can still take an overnight train to Scotland from London Euston, and be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the rails. There are full details on how to arrange it on seat61.com, which our readers voted their favourite travel website in the 2012 Telegraph Travel Awards. Train Pulling into Station (1895) No film in history has had such an astonishing effect on audiences as this apparently unremarkable 50-second short by Auguste and Louis Lumière. One of the first films ever screened for the public, it simply shows a train approaching La Ciotat, a coastal village near Marseille. The Lumières placed their camera close to the platform edge, and when viewers saw the footage they reportedly rushed from their seats, convinced that the train would burst from the screen and crush them. The film is commemorated in the restoration of the world's oldest existing cinema, the Eden in La Ciotat, which is due to be reopened next year by Steven Spielberg. For the latest on the restoration of the Eden, see edentheatre.org/en. For tourist information about La Ciotat, see en.tourisme-laciotat.com. The cinema was featured in the first episode of Michael Portillo's Great Continental Railway Journeys on BBC Two: see bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01ntzxd/Great_Continental_Railway_Journeys_London_to_Monte_Carlo. Brief Encounter (1945) A great train movie with precious little footage of trains in motion. This evergreen classic stars Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as a middle-class couple, both married to others, who conduct a chaste, restrained (and doomed) romance involving weekly meetings, notably in the refreshment room of a railway station. They're noble, moral and self-sacrificing - prized qualities in Britain in the aftermath of the war. Much of the film was shot at Carnforth Station in Lancashire (carnforthstation.co.uk), now a heritage centre and effectively a shrine to fans of the film; its famed refreshment room has been restored to look as it did in the 1940s. Murder on the Orient Express (1974) A lavish adaptation of Agatha Christie's famed whodunit, with the detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) and all 13 murder suspects present and correct aboard the snowbound luxury train. It boasts an absurdly starry cast list - Bacall, Bisset, Ingrid Bergman, Connery, Gielgud and Vanessa Redgrave for starters. Preposterous, of course, but good fun, with lots of overripe acting. Its exterior scenes, even Istanbul station, were recreated in French locations. The best way to get a taste of this brand of high life is to take a ride on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (orient-express.com) - though a five-night journey from Paris all the way to Istanbul will set you back £11,000. The Railway Children (1970) Oh, my Daddy, my Daddy! Can anyone remain unmoved by the line that made Jenny Agutter a lifelong British national treasure? She plays the eldest of three Edwardian children exiled with their mother to a house in the Yorkshire Dales when their father is wrongly accused of spying. There's a railway at the bottom of the garden, which is the basis for their adventures - including a potentially lethal landslide on the track. The film was shot on the Keighley and Worth Valley line (kwvr.co.uk), and features the station of Oakworth, now restored and complete with gas lamps. The Lady Vanishes (1938) Few film-makers used trains and exploited their cinematic potential as frequently as Alfred Hitchcock. This thriller's a delight, set on a pre-war train largely populated by foreigners, travelling through the Balkans but delayed by an avalanche. It made a star of Margaret Lockwood, as a young woman striking up a friendship with an elderly governess - who abruptly disappears. It also introduced the great duo Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne), cricket-loving duffers who keep their steely British resolve well hidden. Interior scenes were shot at the old Gaumont-British studios in Shepherd's Bush and exterior train scenes in Hampshire, some on the Longmoor Military Railway, which was demolished in the 1970s. Liss parish council (whose emblem is a steam engine) has a walk that uses some of the former railway trackbed. Shanghai Express (1932) A curious but intriguing and beautifully shot black-and-white melodrama set aboard a train attacked by Chinese bandits. Marlene Dietrich is the heroine, a courtesan named Shanghai Lily, while Clive Brook is her old flame, a British officer. The director, Josef von Sternberg, eccentrically declared that he wanted everything about the film to evoke the rhythm of a speeding train - so its characters say their lines in sing-song, stop-go fashion. No one on the film went within a thousand miles of Shanghai; it was shot in Hollywood at Paramount Studios, though the glorious (and recently restored) Santa Fe Railroad Depot in San Bernardino, California stood in for a Chinese railway station. The latest incarnation of the Shanghai Express, introduced in July 2011, covers the 819 miles between Beijing and Shanghai in four hours, 48 minutes. For details of how to book a trip, see seat61.com/China.htm#Beijing%20-%20Shanghai. The San Bernardino History and Railroad Museum, located in the Railroad Depot, tells the story of the town and the railroad. For a virtual tour, see sbdepotmuseum.com/photo-histories/museum-virtual-tour. Doctor Zhivago (1965) Two big-screen images from this romantic epic immediately come to mind: the exquisite face of Julie Christie as its heroine, Lara, and the sight of smoke billowing from a train as it cuts through miles of snowbound Russian countryside between Moscow and the Urals. Aboard are the doctor-poet Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and members of his family, fleeing from possible arrest by the Bolsheviks. It's not a journey tourists might wish to create: in the film, this was a heavily guarded cattle train. The Trans-Siberian Express, though might capture most closely the landscape's visual, snowy splendour. See Anthony Lambert's guide to what you can expect on the Trans-Siberian and how to book it.