This presentation focuses on the leitmotiv of the train in Gascoyne’s poetry, with a strong emphasis on “The New Isaiah” (1932), “Elegiac Stanzas in Memory of Alan Berg” (1936), “Phantasmagoria” (1938), “Elsewhere” (1939), “Farewell Chorus” (1940), “Night-Watcher’s Ruminations” (1954) and “Night Thoughts” (1956). Throughout these poems, that span both Gascoyne’s early Surrealist period and his later production, we will see how trains are mainly envisaged as suburban trains that testify to the traumatic experience of modernity characterized by the desire for, the loss of, and the problematic reconstruction of communication networks in the wake of World War II. Articulating both movement and stasis through its circular route, the suburban train, often pictured as an underground train, fosters a hypnotic estrangement that is characteristic of Gascoyne’s modernist writing. The pounding rhythm and jarring music of the text triggers a fragmented vision enhanced by shreds of mythological tales interspersed with cinematic images and the dim echoes of Walt Whitman, Allan Ginsberg and T.S. Eliot’s trains. The train initially construed as a mad engine that traps the enslaved commuters in the frenzied rhythm of production and consumerism, thus appears to function as a kinesthetic prism that metamorphoses the “machinelike traveler” into the “Sleeping Citydweller” who embodies the experimental subject. Welcoming visual and auditory hallucinations he develops a hypersensitive perception that not only recalls Gascoyne’s own Surrealist experiences, but also opens up spatial and temporal boundaries. The spiraling hypnotic motion of the train thus discloses its reverse angle: the point where the train derails, deliberately swerves away from the rail or regula , and gives us to see not the regular horizontal vista upon the outer landscape but the involuted journey of self-estrangement through which the subject can reconnect with his fellow human beings and recognize in his “all-aloneness” “the presence of other beings” . This estrangement paves the way for the real, albeit invisible journey, which leads to no final destination, but rather to a never-ending welcoming movement, as André Benhaïm explains: “L’accueil de l’autre est une épreuve qui nous fait tanguer entre le cri et la caresse” . Here may lie the ultimate purpose of Gascoyne’s trains: in the rolling pitch that simultaneously tears us away from the self-enclosed train of our own night thoughts, and brings us closer to “the human family”.