All aboard for the Harvard Film Archive’s annualall-night movie marathon, this year dedicated to that inexhaustible genre, the train film. Beginning with the Lumière brothers, the train has remained an object of fascination for the cinema, with filmmakers creatively transforming the primal thrill and allure of rail travel into narrative devices, using the steam whistle and rhythmic chug of the engines to drive the story ever forward and loading each compartment with new twists, suspects, surprises. Among the films gathered in Night Train are three splendid examples inspired by the train as a vehicle for coincidence, or destiny: Howard Hawks’ screwball classic Twentieth Century, Carol Reed’s mystery thriller Night Train to Munich and Richard Fleischer’s taut noir The Narrow Margin. Satyajit Ray’s underappreciated Nayak offers a novel turn on the train film, with a kind of chamber room drama of a matinee idol gently lured by an intrepid woman reporter into an unexpectedly revealing and surprising interview on a train to Delhi. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, meanwhile, returns us to a more classical mode, using the train as a means of accelerating suspense, action and mystery while Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi epic Snowpiercer dramatically raises the ante by transforming the eponymous train into a metaphor for class inequity and possible apocalypse.