Start your story with someone looking out a train window.

Posted in Middle School on Nov 1, 2022

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✍️ 98 stories

“SOUTHBOUND” by David Sweet

🏆 Winner of Contest #168

SOUTHBOUNDby David M. SweetDoralea looked out the window of the southbound train. Mid-October leaves dappled the Kentucky hillsides in fiery oranges and burning reds, dull yellows and rusty browns with a few evergreens peaking through the canopies. Colors were made even more vivid by the morning sun and clear, blue sky. Flaxen sedge grass along with green tangles of weeds, brambles, and even a few autumn flowers blurred together as she shifted her gaze downward toward the edges of fields and fence rows speeding by next to the railroad bed. T...

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“Baking up Trouble” by Graham Kinross

Submitted to Contest #168

TW: Hints at sexual assault, swearing.Yellow light reflects off the window as I watch my station disappear in the subway tunnel. Blackness turns into the bright light of a train heading the other direction. I think of my little girl, Tina, with her mother, Billie. Be a better man. No more powers. No risking your freedom. I try not to make eye contact with anyone. Some of them have gang tattoos. I saw a...

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“Your last journey ” by Jennifer Cameron

Submitted to Contest #168

I wish I could tell them to stop worrying now, because this really is quite nice. It’s more peaceful, it’s more me, I think whilst staring out the recently cleaned window at mountain peaks coated in mist and marshmallow clouds. They all cried when I died, those great big sobs that seem to take over your whole body and I guess it was nice in a selfish sort of way to know that I’ll be missed but it still felt like all the veins in my heart were being pulled opposite ways to see them so upset. Heartbroken was the word mum had used. The train g...

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“Familiar Strangers” by Edward Latham

Submitted to Contest #168

Home. It’s that place where you release the breath you didn’t even realise you were holding. The place where you sleep as deep as you did when you were ten years younger. The place where you let go of your future worries and relax into the present.For Harry Tufton home was the 18:05 train from London Bridge to Brighton. The journey was just over an hour and occasionally, when the world weighed too heavy, he would fall fast asleep. His stop was the last, so no worries there. More often though, he would sit, appearing to stare out the win...

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“At a Second Glance” by Rama Shaar

Submitted to Contest #168

It wasn’t so much disgust as it was curiosity mixed with shock. My fault really for allowing eye contact. I once heard that human beings are usually aware of being watched even from behind. Something to do with our primal survival instinct and so. I do allow myself to stare at beautiful people, but for no longer than four or five seconds, which is usually the time it takes them to realise they’re being stared at.I quickly lowered my gaze and hoped that the train would move, leaving behind the angelic-featured young woman I had indulged in ad...

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“Finding Myself Among the Dough” by Jeannette Miller

Submitted to Contest #168

As I stare out of my window seat, I’m trying to memorize the lines of cobblestone road leading up to the train’s platform. The blue sky, its bluest since I arrived here seven days ago under the pretense of finding myself. Every cloud a whisper of its self, promising to be something full and billowy but never materializing then slowly dissipating into thin whisps of white. I hear the noise of the city calling me and yet I must go for I fear this place, with its effortless existence, will entrap me here under false pretenses. I was only supp...

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“Encounter on a Train” by Kelly Johnson

Submitted to Contest #168

*This story contains multiple sensitive themes: Mental heath/PTSD, and graphic details of an auto accident*Pitch black night; that's all I can see through the glass. I can hear bullets of rain hammering against the window, but all I can see is dark, endless nothing. I close my eyes, and try to focus on the subtle click-clack of train tracks. At first, all I hear is the assaulting rain. A man with a gray beard snoring in the seat in front of mine, gray hat with a silvery white feather tipped precariously over his face. A distant conversation ...

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“Back” by Milena Todorova

Submitted to Contest #168

Rails, buildings, smaller buildings, trees, grass, fences, dots, longer dots, dragging lines, all moving faster and faster into a blurry running-away foxtrot. Leaving Vienna Central Station. Mel closed her eyes to lose the dizzy image and laid her head back into the cosy seatback. Coffee. She hoped the smell was more than a false brain trigger to her nose. She had slept enough and still felt sleepy. And hey, eighteen hours on a stinky bus crossing stinky borders in a stinky fog that smelled like despair. She had left her Plovdiv apar...

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“Last Train To Davos” by P. T. Golden

Submitted to Contest #168

The grime on the glass from a thousand greasy fingers distorted the dismal scene outside. "Can you believe people used to breathe that stuff? It's so thick I can't see; that is a city, isn't it?" Thomas spoke to nobody in particular.The woman in the aisle seat wiped the sweat from under her numerous chins and grunted, pointing at a red dot moving along a line displayed on a digital map. Paris, it said. Faint shadows hide in a dark thick swirling smog."Have you ever been there? I heard it was beautiful once." The bleak scenery made even uncom...

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“Seven Days to Know You” by Caroline Conner

Submitted to Contest #168

Staring out the window of the train, Sammie observed the scenery as it rushed by. It was early fall, the ideal time to be traveling through North Carolina. Though she had not been many places in the world, she doubted anything was as beautiful as the fiery shades of red and orange draped over the trees outside. Try as she might to enjoy it, a glumness now clung to her. Only a couple hours into her trip on her way to meet her six-month-old goddaughter and visit her best friend after a long year away, she received a phone call that they were ...

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“The Passenger Train to Love” by Greg Gillis

Submitted to Contest #168

Steven gazed spellbound out the window at the blurs of trees, hydro poles, and rail markers as they raced past his window while he sat in the dining car of the Amtrak train from Chicago to St. Louis. When he left Union Station in Chicago at 7:15am, the sun was just beginning to rise over the eastern horizon. Steven had one thing on his mind, to locate the one person in the world who he couldn’t stop thinking of…...

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“Wrong Track - Right Track” by Murray Burns

Submitted to Contest #168

Wrong Track – Right TrackI’m not sure this is what Mr. Zamzow had in mind when he told the class, “For very action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”; I got on the train- she didn’t.The pressure to excel, to succeed, to someday arrive at the Promised Land of wealth, power and position. Surely this could not be vanquished by a high school romance. It seemed like love, but my Dad warned me all about “puppy love”. In this day and age, the odds of a teenage romance making it to the alter, followed by a big house in the country with cute l...

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“Orphan Train” by Brenda Wilson

Submitted to Contest #168

Two little eyes and a frown. I draw these onto the fogged-up window as the train chugs into the tunnel. My four-year-old sister, Kate, is asleep on my leg, drooling all over my only clean dress. I want to wake her up. I want to be mad at her for soiling the last thing Mama gave me—the last thing she ever will. But I don’t have the strength. Papa said everything will be alright now. We’d be safe now. This train will take us somewhere we can stay healthy and happy until we can be a family again. But we can never be a whole family aga...

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“A Ripple in Time” by Stuart Lawrence

Submitted to Contest #168

Corey awoke to a bump as his train came to a stop, and his coach car settled against the cars on either end and glanced outside the cabin window. The sun was cresting, and the early morning frost still covered the ground. Wooden rail carts with steel wheels laden with steamer trunks sat on the platform, and domed lamps with opaque glass chimneys hung from the ceiling of a white clapboard station. “Shasta Springs station, Shasta Springs station,” the conductor announced, “Three hour water stop, the local time is Seven-fifteen and the temperat...

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“The Journey Towards Self Love” by Audrey Harmon

Submitted to Contest #168

They call them patchwork hills. Rolling, misshapen, vibrant as the stock photo shown on my laptop’s background. Each time I take out my Iphone 4 to snap a photo, I’m disappointed. There is no way to capture this passing beauty but to look at it in wonder. That hardly seems fair. We’re on our way to Cornwall, England to sing and make music for the locals. Almost everyone on this train was a stranger up until one week ago, when this overseas program began. We’ve been in transit for over four hours, but I feel as though I could stay here ...

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Ended on 23:59 - Oct 21, 2022 EST

Won by David Sweet 🏆

Title: SOUTHBOUND

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Start your story with someone looking out a train window.

Submissions are closed

✍️ 98 stories

“SOUTHBOUND” by David Sweet

“Baking up Trouble” by Graham Kinross

“Your last journey ” by Jennifer Cameron

“Familiar Strangers” by Edward Latham

“At a Second Glance” by Rama Shaar

“Finding Myself Among the Dough” by Jeannette Miller

“Encounter on a Train” by Kelly Johnson

“Back” by Milena Todorova

“Last Train To Davos” by P. T. Golden

“Seven Days to Know You” by Caroline Conner

“The Passenger Train to Love” by Greg Gillis

“Wrong Track - Right Track” by Murray Burns

“Orphan Train” by Brenda Wilson

“A Ripple in Time” by Stuart Lawrence

“The Journey Towards Self Love” by Audrey Harmon

🌟 Similar prompts

Write a story about a character who is moving on, literally or figuratively.

Make a train station an important part of your story.

Write a story about a character who misses a train, for better or worse.

Write a story that includes someone saying, “Bon voyage.”

Contest #168

Enter our weekly contest!

$250

Prize money

280

Contest entries

105

Stories

Win $250 in our short story competition 🏆

Explore more writing prompt ideas: