YMMV / The Train

• Awesome Music: Maurice Jarre's soundtrack for the film is an appropriately heart-pounding, fast-paced score for an action-adventure movie.
• Love to Hate: Colonel von Waldheim is generally regarded as a very good villain, managing to be both three-dimensional (A strict Nazi officer, a genuine art connoisseur, and an egomaniacal thief) as well as thoroughly despicable.
• Signature Scene: The shot of the steam locomotive crashing into another derailed locomotive is easily one of the most recognizable shots from this movie
  • The bombing run on the railyard is another stand out for reasons listed in the next trope.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Except for one brief rear-projection shot, there are no visual effects in this film. None. The bombing of the rail yard? The SNCF couldn't afford to demolish and renovate the yard, so John Frankenheimer offered to blow the whole thing up for them. They used tons of TNT and gasoline. The art train barely making it out of the bombing? Real. The stunt work? Burt Lancaster running to catch the train and jumping on, and Albert Remy jumping in between two moving rail cars and uncoupling them? Real. Planes flying over, cruising at less than a hundred feet? Real. A steam train derailing, and a full-sized steam locomotive crashing into another full-sized locomotive at full speed? Real.