Over the past three years I have conducted oral history interviews with more than fifty people from across the UK about their experiences of Interrailing in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Along the way I also discovered three contrasting films which featured this late-twentieth-century youth travel phenomenon.
Released in 1995, Aditya Chopra’s ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ (known as ‘DDLJ’ and translating to ‘The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride’) is one of the most successful Indian movies of all time. This exuberant Bollywood boy-meets-girl tale stars Shah Rukh Khan as Raj and Kajol as Simran, and begins in London where both of the main characters grew up. Although Simran’s father has committed her to marrying his friend’s son in the Punjab, he agrees somewhat reluctantly to her taking a pre-wedding Interrail trip with two girlfriends. Early in the journey she meets fellow Interrailer Raj on a train, and a series of adventures in France and Switzerland ensue before the action moves to India for the nuptials.
‘DDLJ’ was a worldwide hit, and played in a cinema in Mumbai for over twenty years until its final screening in 2015. To put this in context, the previous Indian record was a five-and-a-half year run for the action-adventure classic ‘Sholay’ (1975). At three hours’ duration, ‘DDLJ’ requires commitment but, as reviewer Jordan Allen argues, unlike American romantic comedies, the film’s length plus the onscreen chemistry between Khan and Kajol enables a believable romance to develop. Scott Jordan Harris adds, ‘Watching ‘DDLJ’ I feel the same desperate desire for the lovers to be united that I feel watching ‘Casablanca’, ‘When Harry Met Sally’ or ‘Brief Encounter’.
Also released in 1995, ‘Before Sunrise’ is the first of a trilogy directed by Richard Linklater and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. On a train heading towards Vienna, American Eurail traveller Jesse (Hawke) strikes up a conversation with Céline (Delpy) who is returning home to Paris. On a whim Jesse invites Céline to spend one evening with him in the Austrian capital, an offer she accepts. As the pair become acquainted while wandering the city’s streets and visiting parks and bars, they have several encounters. These include with a fortune teller who says that Céline is an adventurer and seeker, and with a poet who incorporates their chosen word (randomly, ‘milkshake’) into a verse. Possibly in a nod to Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ (1949), Vienna’s Giant Ferris Wheel is the setting for their first kiss.
While not as commercially successful as ‘DDLJ’, and considerably understated in comparison, ‘Before Sunrise’ was well received by critics. In a review for Empire in 2000, Caroline Westbrook asserts how ‘Just five minutes of screen time in the company of Hawke and Delpy provides more insight into relationships than a dozen romantic comedies could ever muster up between them’. More recently, to coincide with the re-release of the film to mark its thirty-year-anniversary, Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian reflects how ‘It is the lightness of this film which is still charming; Jesse and Céline are free from everything, free from work worries or family cares, but they are also free from the gravity of cause-and-effect, the world of consequences and responsibilities’.
In their respective ways, each film captures how chance meetings can take place during long rail journeys, and how spontaneous decisions can lead to unexpected outcomes. Yet, when the films were first released, Interrailing was at a low ebb. From its inception in 1972, the scheme’s popularity grew steadily and by its first peak in 1990, over 371,000 young backpackers from across Europe travelled around their continent using an Interrail pass. Over the next few years sales plummeted due to a combination of factors including the conflicts in Yugoslavia which impacted some of the key Interrail routes, and competition from other forms of youth travel. By 1995 the annual number of youth passes purchased had dropped to 122,000, and sales remained stagnant for the rest of the decade despite Interrail’s cinematic appearances.
Three decades on, Interrail is enjoying its second peak of popularity, partly because passes are now available to travellers of all ages. In 2024, combined sales of Interrail and Eurail passes exceeded 1.1 million with Interrail accounting for more than 746,000, of which fifty-two per cent were youth travellers and forty-four per cent were adults or seniors. Out of the fifty-three people I interviewed who went Interrailing between 1972 and 1997, almost a third of them said they had taken further trips in more recent years, some accompanied by their offspring. This trend has also been portrayed in the movies.
‘Off the Rails’ is a comedy drama directed by Jules Williamson in which Kelly Preston, Jenny Seagrove and Sally Phillips play three friends who reunite at the funeral of Anna, their Interrail companion from several decades earlier. Anna left them a gift of four Interrail passes and instructions to travel to Majorca within five days to see the Festival of Light at Palma Cathedral, a twice-yearly phenomenon which they narrowly missed during their previous visit. The only condition is that they take Anna’s teenage daughter Maddie with them. In addition to their backpacks, the three women carry considerable emotional baggage, including dependency on alcohol and pills, financial worries, and marital difficulties.
The film was shot in 2019 but released two years later due to Preston’s untimely death. In the intervening period, the UK officially left the European Union and, like the rest of the world, was only just beginning to emerge from the Covid pandemic. With neither event mentioned, and a soundtrack consisting almost entirely of songs by Blondie (Anna’s favourite group), ‘Off the Rails’ seems to be set in a historical vacuum.
More frustratingly, as Nick Schager points out in his review for Variety, it is never clear what bound the women together in the first place and why their original Interrail trip was so important to their friendship. Any such nuances are overshadowed by a series of increasingly implausible situations. At one point the foursome are in the Catalan city of Girona supposedly catching a local train to Barcelona but, after a drunken night, wake up in rural Italy. That’s a long sleep, especially in a regular train carriage! In his two-star review in The Guardian, Phil Hoad wryly notes how the film does to ‘European geography what Hollywood often does to London’.
For all its flaws, ‘Off the Rails’ attempts to address the issue of departed friends, although not altogether successfully. This resonated as several of the people I interviewed talked with some sadness about their late travel companions, which made my research seem all the more timely. I was in the privileged position of recording Interrailers’ stories while they were still in a position to share them.
If you have watched any of the three films highlighted in this article, or know of other movies with connections to Interrail-style travel in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, please leave a comment below or contact me directly. I am aware of a French film called ‘Interrail’ (2018) but have not been able to access a copy. The storyline, however, appears to focus on twenty-first-century rail travel.
This article arose from my postgraduate research project at Royal Holloway, University of London which is supervised by Dr Amy Tooth Murphy and Dr Edward Madigan. My thesis entitled ‘Anywhere in Europe from your local station: An oral history of the late-twentieth-century Interrail experience from a UK perspective’ is in the final review stage and will be submitted for examination shortly.
Note: The other films in Richard Linklater’s trilogy are ‘Before Sunset’ (2004) and ‘Before Midnight’ (2013). A Eurail pass is the version of an Interrail pass which can be purchased by non-European residents.
The Long Path 