Plot riffs on the original story include a black US serviceman on the lam in this earnest but likable homage to the beloved 1970 kids’ adventure
1970 family classic The Railway Children
, about three children forced by circumstance to move with their mother to a cottage in Yorkshire and have adventures involving steam trains. She returned to play the mum in a 2000 TV movie version, and now Agutter is back as her original character, 40 years older, in this sparky sequel imagining a new generation of railway children in 1944, a reboot devised and co-written by producer Jemma Rodgers and directed by Morgan Matthews.
Maybe it’s a bit self-conscious in the way it revives and reimagines the classic plot points, and there could be historical authenticity issues. Would US army military police really have been allowed to arrest an underage British civilian and transport her across country in handcuffs? But there’s a fair bit of fun, channelling bygone classics such as Hue and Cry and Whistle Down the Wind.
Three evacuee kids from wartime Manchester, Lily , Pattie and Ted fetch up in exactly the same village where Roberta has apparently stayed on and is now a kindly grandmother: her daughter is the headteacher of the local school and has a slightly Just-William-ish son called Thomas , whose dad is away in the RAF fighting the Germans.
This is a film with a touch more savvy about the real world than its 1970 forebear, at least partly because it has child actors who are the same age as their characters. The now legendary scene from the first film in which Bobbie sees her daddy through the steam on the railway platform – a scene which has become more iconic than its creators ever quite envisaged – is echoed and doubled in a new dream that Lily has, in a much more serious context.
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