Closely Watched Trains

Closely Watched Trains is a novella by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, published in 1965. It is set in German-occupied Czechoslovakia toward the end of the Second World War.

The story follows a twenty-two-year-old apprentice signalman at a small railway station. The young man struggles with sexual anxiety and becomes involved with the wartime resistance.

The work is Hrabal's most famous. The scholar Robert Porter argues that its substance lies outside the realms of conventional narrative realism, and describes it not so much as a war story as a comic exploration of an individual's existential anguish.

The story was adapted into a 1966 Czechoslovak film of the same name, directed by Jiří Menzel. The film is one of the most famous examples of the Czechoslovak New Wave and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2015, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an audio adaptation by the British dramatist Ian Kershaw, with John Bradley as Milos.