The Night Train North (Trailer)

John Barlow / 'The Night Train North' / 2018 / Super 16mm / Colour / Sound / Duration: 5 min., 40sec.

Written nearly one hundred years before W. H. Auden’s famous ‘Night Mail’ of 1936, a poem popularised by its memorable inclusion in the documentary film of the same name, was a rather lesser-known poem exploring a similar overnight train subject: 'The Night Mail North (Euston Square 1840)'. A captivating, if somewhat eccentric, piece by the English civil servant and sometime poet Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell (1837-1915), ‘The Night Mail North’ evoked the scene at London's Euston station and in the sleeper carriage of the night mail train as it heads north from there to the Scottish Highlands.