The sketches from this period, as published in Giger’s Film Design, are some of the most captivating pieces the artist ever produced. Giger began to imagine what a train of the future might look like, and the results are typically outlandish: he thought that passengers would be housed in pods, a little like the hypersleep chambers in Alien, and moved in and out of carriages with a crane mounted on the ceiling.

Other drawings showed passengers lying down in larger vessels like cutlery drawers, and loaded and unloaded from the train’s carriages by truck. Still others depicted the train as a bio-mechanoid creature – akin to those he’d come up with for Jodorowsky’s Dune years earlier – with a skull-like head and arm-like appendages that speared commuters as they waited on the platform.

These, presumably, were a mere fraction of the sketches Giger produced in the nine months between 1988 and 1989 – we can only wonder what his designs for the creature running around on the train might have looked like. But the project itself ultimately proved to be short-lived; Scott left Carolco over creative differences, and his attempts to have The Train made at another studio came to nothing.

Disembarking

Ridley Scott ultimately abandoned The Train and went on to make Thelma And Louise and 1492: The Conquest Of Paradise. Joel Silver continued in his attempts to get The Train made, however, and the screenplay was later rewritten and called Isobar. Roland Emmerich was set to direct, with Sylvester Stallone and Kim Basinger attached as its stars.

Despite rewrites from Dean Devlin and Steven de Souza, no one could quite nail down what the creature on the train should do or look like – in some drafts it feasted on adrenaline, while in others it had tentacles and sucked the moisture from its victims. An astonishingly high $90m was set aside for Isobar in 1990, yet the film never made its way out of pre-production; as recently as 2006, stories were circulating that Isobar was about to start shooting, based on Dean Devlin’s screenplay from 16 years earlier. To date, nothing more has come to light.