There can’t be many classic British family movies which feature Russian anti-tsarist writers exiled in Yorkshire. The Railway Children from 1970 is now re-released, as a curtain-raiser to a forthcoming sequel, The Railway Children Return, which will be set 40 years on and features Jenny Agutter playing a grownup version of her original character.
The original is robustly and adroitly directed by Lionel Jeffries, who also adapted the Edith Nesbit novel and it continues to exert its grip on our collective teatime imagination, due to its unworldly sweetness and gentleness and its forthright sense of decency – especially, maybe, that final scene where the children’s wrongly imprisoned father emerges from the steam on the railway platform, a moment as dramatic and mysterious as Omar Sharif galloping through the heat-haze in Lawrence of Arabia, to Jenny Agutter’s breathy delight: “Oh my daddy!”
