The Titfield Thunderbolt

I have seen this film more times than I can count. It is by no means a masterpiece, but I believe it is unfairly dismissed and that it is a great deal stronger than some detractors will admit. It is sometimes said The Titfield Thunderbolt is proof that the Ealing formula was in irreversilbe decline by 1952, and that the film is sentimental, whimsical and twee. Certainly, it has little of the brilliant dark humour of Kind Hearts and Coronets, nor does it have the quiet strength of story behind The Lavender Hill Mob, or Passport To Pimlico. But The Titfield Thunderbolt has aged better than anyone could have predicted (better, even, than The Ladykillers to my mind) and it has stood the test of time in a way that many of its sister films from Ealing have not. Why is this?
Certainly, the film is sentimental and whimsical, but the tweeness the audience might once have felt has been replaced by something else - nostalgia. The world of Titfield has vanished for good. Of course, the steam trains and branch lines of Britain disappeared a very long time ago, but in the last twenty years has been an acceleration of the destruction of rural England and its character. In particular, rural people and rural culture no longer seems to be part of the national consciousness. The characters in T.T.T seem as eternal as England itself. They could have come from from Chaucer, or Fielding, or Dickens even; anywhere in England's past - but not its present. Suburbia encroaches ever further into what was once open country and takes no prisoners.
The film has, therefore, acquired a new resonance, not only as a portrait of a vanished age of branch lines, and of a time when people greeted each other in the street, but of a time when trains ran through villages - and ran on time. In the last ten years alone, the film has gained a strange new power, as we have watched our modern train network sink still further into chaos, whilst becoming ever more expensive to use. The words spoken by the Squire (John Gregson) at the village meeting are particularly ironic. He warns that the closure of the branch line will result in villages clogged with traffic, houses with numbers not names, the village "condemned to death". Fifty years on, and every word has come true.
Watch The Titfield Thunderbolt for its wonderful cinematography (thanks to Douglas Slocombe), for its great cast (especially George Relph, Hugh Griffith and Edie Martin), lovely locations and its fantastic steam engines. Watch it as a portrait of a lost world. But most of all watch it for its humour - it's funny!

I would be very interested to hear of anyone who has any stories about, or opinions on, The Titfield Thunderbolt.