TRAINS

How modern freight and passenger trains look and go, with flaps to offer inside views.

As exercises in bland generalities go, this French import stays solidly on the rails—pairing labels or colorless comments (“The engine car is the only part of the train with an engine”) to impersonal painted views of toylike trains. These all look inert, whether en route through artificial-looking settings or sitting at platforms amid diverse clots of small human figures, all with smiles and dot eyes, strolling or scurrying past. A spare assortment of flaps and pull tabs open sliding doors, show rows of empty or occupied seats, depict a select gallery of freight-car types, or allow glimpses of wheels, electrical arms, and the engineer in the cab. Aside from a postage-stamp–size image of a “Peruvian mountain train” and the barest nose of a maglev, the trains on view, named or not, are all European (or partly, in the case of the Trans-Siberian Railway).

A routine, juiceless candidate chugging straight for the storage yard.