The latest domestic thriller to grab attention, massive sales and a place at the top of the bestseller list is Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train – it’s a very English book, so it’s even more impressive that this debut novel has been hugely successful in the US as well.

There’s been much song and dance about it slipstreaming the success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but little about its debt to a long and venerable train trope in literature. The starting point is that a young woman gets the same train every day, and watches out for a house that backs on to the line. She imagines a life for the happy, good-looking couple in their garden, and looks for them obsessively twice a day, there and back. But what she sees begins to make her fear that something is going wrong. It’s a twisty thriller, with a lot going on – but who doesn’t feel a frisson at the thought of what you see out of a train window? From planes you see clouds, from boats you see seabirds, from cars everything streaks past too fast to notice. So plenty of authors have used that transitory moment of reflection on a train, when time seems to freeze as the landscape rushes by, to their advantage.

The most famous example is perhaps Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington – actually a double-train moment. Two trains moving in the same direction briefly overlap – and Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a murder on the parallel train. No one believes her, no body turns up, so her friend Miss Marple has to investigate for her. The murder is a deeply memorable moment, and once you’ve read the book, you’re always a bit nervous looking across in those seconds when two trains move together.

An earlier Christie novel, the Man in a Brown Suit, from 1924, contains a hilarious discussion of taking photos out of a train window:

“It must be some curve if you can photograph the front part of the train from the back, it will look awfully dangerous.”

I pointed out to her that no one could possibly tell it had been taken from the back of the train. She looked at me pityingly. “I shall write underneath it. ‘Taken from the train. Engine going round a curve.’”

“You could write that under any snapshot of a train.”

I think of this every time I see one of those curved-train photos, while still thrilling to the view.

Frances Cornford’s view from a train was inspiring in a very different way. Her poem To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train has the memorable lines:

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves …

But this is rather ill-natured, as GK Chesterton pointed out in a testy rebuttal poem:

Why do you rush through the fields in trains,
Guessing so much and so much.

There are train travellers who look out the window with less emotion. In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, narrator Christopher, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, doesn’t do many jokes, but he understands one about three academics on a train looking out the window and seeing a brown cow: they describe it according to their professions of economist, logician and mathematician. (You can find the joke in full here at the Wolfram website.) You can’t imagine the joke working anywhere but on a train.

Haddon took his title from a piece of dialogue between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gregory in Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story Silver Blaze which – coincidentally? – features another window moment, in which Holmes calculates the speed his train is travelling at by looking out the window and counting and timing the telegraph poles. (The answer is “53-and-a-half miles an hour”.)

The train that takes The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen from the poverty of District 12 (she has never been in a car) to the Capitol is rather faster: it moves at 250mph. If you think about it, an aeroplane or one of the hovercrafts that feature in the novels might be a more likely form of conveyance, but Suzanne Collins’s choice works well, giving Katniss and Peeta time to think about their predicament, while allowing them to make the most of their first glimpse of the city:

The train finally begins to slow and suddenly bright light floods the compartment. We can’t help it. Both Peeta and I run to the window to see what we’ve only seen on television, the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem. The cameras haven’t lied about its grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal … The people begin to point at us eagerly as they recognise a tribute train rolling into the city. I step away from the window, sickened by their excitement, knowing they can’t wait to watch us die.

Murder in White was another unexpected bestseller – a reprint of a 1937 murder mystery by forgotten author J Jefferson Farjeon. The story begins on a snow-trapped train. A passenger looks out the window: “The snow had ceased falling and the motionless white scene was like a film that had suddenly stopped.” The train is going nowhere, and the passengers are about to head out on an ill-fated expedition.

The train in Paula Hawkins’ bestseller stops as well, but only to pause at a red signal. These regular stops are enough to draw her heroine into the lives of a couple living by the side of the line – testament to the hypnotic power of those transitory scenes we see out of a train window.