by Sam Juliano
A steady drizzle and overcast sky suffused the late morning hours of Saturday, 17, August, 2013, in the town of Carnforth, part of the northwestern county of Lancashire, England. The gloomy weather is pretty much normal for that region and that time of year, but somehow it atmospherically accentuated the twenty or so mile trek we embarked on from our home base of Kendal in the county of Cumbria. Our destination was a seemingly sedate and rustic train depot on the outer fringes of a parish populated by barely five-thousand, and geographically distinguished by hilly terrain and its close proximity to the sea. The Carnforth Railway Station, which has a history dating back to the mid 1800’s was used as a waylay station for soldiers during both World Wars, and served as a junction on the London, Midland and Scottish railways. It was refurbished in 1938, and subsequently entered the movie history books after it was chosen as the primary setting for one of the most famous films ever made – David Lean’s timeless classic of repressed emotion – Brief Encounter, which was filmed during the last stage of World War II in early 1945. The location was chosen by film executives, because it was far enough away from major cities to avert blackouts which were common during the war years. Said Lean: “the war was still on and the railway people said, ‘there may be an air raid at any moment, and you’ll have time to put out the lights in that remote part up in the north. We’ll know when the planes are coming.’ We were a blaze of lights from filming.’ More recently renovations were completed to the Brief Encounter refreshment room (the tea room in the film) and the “Heritage Center” that are now places of pilgrimage for the film’s fans.
My recollection of the daytime darkness and the film that made this station famous was again brought into focus the first time I laid eyes upon Robert Burleigh and Wendell Minor’s exquisite Night Train, Night Train, an atmospheric immersion of the nighttime travel experience, a tone poem which is more attuned to a symphony in music than it is to a story arc in children’s literature. Burleigh’s concise narrative is presumably set around the mid 30’s during the Depression years as per the car models and billboards, though Minor himself spills the beans in his final note when he talks about the featured Dreyfuss locomotive which he “wonders what it might have been like to rider in the 1930s or 1940s.” As the actual setting of David Lean’s nocturnal train station romance is on the eve of the Second World War circa late 1938, an adult reader with a vivid memory will probably be able or inclined to connect the dots. When you add Minor’s mostly-monochrome graphite which magnificently negotiates shadows, lights flash within a celestial perspective it is easy to envision the moody work of cinematographer Robert Krasker who brought dazzling cognizance to this mode of transport in Lean’s poetic work. Of course very young children, who are the target audience won’t discover Lean and Krasker until maybe fifteen years later in their lives but they have Burleigh and Minor to lead the way in replicating the basic tenets of a train ride in all its wonder and excitement. Book and film lovers will of course think of Chris Van Alsberg’s beloved Caldecott Medal winning The Polar Express, another book set in the blackest night depicting a train ride to the North Pole at Christmastime though children’s literature can boast a number of distinguished books on the subject including Brian Floca’s Caldecott winning Locomotive, The Little Engine That Could by Arnold Munk and Lois Lenski, Train by Elisha Cooper and the Caldecott Honor winning Freight Train by Donald Crews.
A traveling suitcase and a teddy bear on the nocturnally implicated title page announce a train ride, one confirmed by the opening canvas of a with teddy bear perched next to him boy beholding horizontal departure lights as a train pulls out of a station. Burleigh aurally replicates the fleeting moments when a train leaves the dock, with bumps and chugs vying for sound prominence as the speed picks up. Minor opens up the perspective envisioning the snaky long shot of the train procession moving into rural obscurity with mechanical prowess. The author then introduces a refrain he will employ repeatedly, but always adding sensory elements to define the experience by way of lights, colors and sounds in an otherwise drab monochrome landscape. Still there’s beauty in this non-descriptive environment which is captured with atmospheric rich blacks and grays that define distance and frame the starry sky. Night train, night train, hold-on-tight train. Our youthful protagonist with his nose against the glass watches as the train again passes through an inhabited hamlet, one where a car idols behind a railroad crossing gate, a scenario dominated by incandescent reds, which denote the temporary impasse. Clang-clang. Ding-ding. Town ahead. Gate down. Blink-blink. Hello, red. From the train window the red bursting looks like pop bumpers on a pinball machine, and for the boy an opportunity for happy pause.
After the track divergence denotes the train’s direction – Night train, night train, go left-go-right train in a desolate stretch illuminated by the red on a stop-n-go pole the trains speeds by a farmhouse with a second floor blue window, which Burleigh compares to an eye – A barn. A house against the sky. Big blue window like an eye. Meanwhile in the sky the white of the stars will urge a wish, though there isn’t a real opportunity for a more meditative, lingering invocation. The train must reach its destination in a timely manner. White star. Twinkling far away. Make a wish. Can’t stop. Can’t stay. A cow keeps watch as the train chugs by under the star lit night. With Night train, night train, wish I might train introduced as the boy and his teddy watch a distant red traffic signal the color orange. Burleigh opines that the Halloween color identified the sparks created by “wheels on iron” and Minor envisions the train through the white locomotive beam and the orange friction. Mountain. Tunnel. Darker dark. Wheels on iron. Orange spark. A return to civilization in the form of a purple neon billboard directing drivers to a cafe in the distance is beheld by the observant train passenger who disavows slumber. Minor again shows how and why he is unparalleled in painting small town Americana in all its innocent and minimalist glory. With Night train, night train, what’s-next-in-sight train Minor integrates the blue in the form of a shooting star, the orange as a window of a church and the red and white as lights on the far side of an inlet on a close-up canvas of a rural town. Green and yellow are introduced as the rain crosses a tressell bridge. A green light shines from the water bank – Bridge. Click-clack. River. Flow. Green light. and the moon is a big, fixated low in the sky is making its presence known: Round. Yellow. Mr. Moon. Watching. Whispering, “Be there soon.”
Night train, night train, beam-of-light train is the final refrain before the arrival of dawn. The locomotive leads the way past a station exhibiting the dazzling display of all seven colors seen previously in one of Minor’s most atmospheric and resplendent tapestries. As the boy begins to nod off and dreams take hold, the color scheme is kaleidoscopic, adored with sight lines of red, green and yellow. Dream. Colors. Shadows. Light. Riding onward through the night. With the advent of a new day Minor subdues his graphite blacks, allowing color, now discernible by the human eye, to dominate the train’s arrival to the city where boy and companion observe the cityscape. The boy is now seen wearing a red jacket carrying his brown teddy as his mom, wearing a pink dress, holds his hand as they walk away from the now departed train, concluding the wondrous adventure.
Burleigh and Minor have teamed up on several outstanding picture books, perhaps most notably Edward Hopper Paints His World, and they have proven remarkable chemistry. The author’s spare yet descriptive language is a perfect cue for Minor, who in this new treasure has provided the children’s book community with one of his finest works, a tour de force in style and atmosphere that deserves extended scrutiny from the Caldecott committee. In the train literature for children Night Train, Night Train sporting an eye-popping trains station cover with blue and yellow lettering is destined to be a classic.
Famed artist Wendell Minor
Note: This is the seventh entry in the 2018 Caldecott Medal Contender series. The annual venture does not purport to predict what the committee will choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running. In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration. It is anticipated the series will include in the neighborhood of around 25 titles; the order which they are being presented in is arbitrary, as every book in this series is a contender. Some of my top favorites of the lot will be done near the end. The awards will be announced in late January, hence the reviews will continue until around the middle of that month.