How we made: The Railway Children

Actors Jenny Agutter and Sally Thomsett recall bunking off to a Leeds nightclub and being banned from driving during the making of the classic 1970 children's film

• 
• • Interviews by Anna Tims
  • The Guardian, Monday 6 May 2013

‘A thrill to step on the footplate’ … Sally Thomsett and Jenny Agutter, on right, in The Railway Children. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

Jenny Agutter, actor

I was reluctant to accept the role of Roberta because I'd played her two years earlier in a BBC series, and had since left school. I'd filmed Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, so it felt like going backwards. But the director Lionel Jeffries was such an exuberant personality, you couldn't say no.
He was also a fine actor and, whether deliberately or subconsciously, assumed the role of an Edwardian father figure while filming. If a take went well, he'd give us half a crown – I wondered how far he thought that would go down the pub. Once, Sally [Thomsett, who played Phyllis] and I slipped out, and when we got back he was waiting, pointing at his watch and saying he hoped we would be fit for filming the next morning.
Part of the film's success was due to his affinity with that era. Lionel was very sensitive; each character had their own piece of music that recurred. For a scene where I had to read bad news, he set aside a quiet space where I could get upset beforehand; he could also be jokey to lighten us up.

Everyone talks about the moment when I run down the platform crying: "Daddy, my daddy!" I was supposed to post-synchronise the sound after filming; but because I was out of breath, and the steam from the train was hissing, it was impossible to capture it in the studio. Lionel was a perfectionist; in the end, he had to clean up the original soundtrack and use that.

The steam railway was maintained by volunteers who really loved those trains. They told us all about coal and steam and how the different levers worked, so it became a thrill to step up on the footplate. In the scene where Roberta stops the train before the landslide, then faints on the track, the engine was actually moving backwards away from me; the film was reversed. At the end of the film, we shot a long sequence during which a tree that had been concealing some telegraph lines fell down. It was too late to reshoot, so if you look carefully you'll see a very modern intrusion in the background.

There was tremendous enthusiasm. Lionel always worked with people he cared about: Dinah Sheridan, who played our mother, had been through a bad time and hadn't acted for a while – she was thrilled to be working. Bernard Cribbins (station porter Mr Perks) was always telling jokes and funny stories, and Sally Thomsett was so wonderfully childish and scatty.

After the premiere, the film disappeared. I took stage roles and moved to America, where people thought The Railway Children was a story about people from the wrong side of the tracks. When I came back to the UK after 17 years, I was surprised to see it referred to in the press. It took 10 years and the release of the video to turn it into a classic.
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Footnote:
The movie is of course based om E.Nesbit's novel first published in 1906
In my booselling days I remember selling it a s Puffin paperback. Here is the 1st edition cover.