Snowpiercer’s Biggest Mystery: Why Is It a Train?

It doesn’t matter which Snowpiercer adaptation we’re talking about, the core remains the same: the apocalypse in the form of a new Ice Age hit the Earth hard, and the only survivors are the people who managed to board a visionary billionaire’s around-the-world train. The train is self-sustainable and needs no outside resources, but the tensions inside of it between the privileged and the poor are rising.

You don’t even need to take a step back to notice the huge issue with this design. If the entirety of the human race depends on this one ecosystem which doesn’t require outside resources, why risk everything by putting it on tracks? Why not just build it on some nice flat surface and avoid countless potential crises in the future?

Why Was Snowpiercer Made as a Train?

There are three major ways to explain this seemingly weird decision. First, there was the implication that the train’s movement provided it with energy, but since that one violently abuses the very idea of physics, we’ll skip over it. Even if it worked like that, there would’ve been no need to have Snowpiercer go around the entire world: a mile-long circle would have sufficed.

Second, of course, is the underlying idea of Snowpiercer: it’s one big allegory for capitalism, and a stable but tyrannical settlement has been way too overused by the time Snowpiercer rolled around. In the meantime, a train with a bunch of pleasantries for the rich that literally runs on poor children’s lives feels properly demonic for the task of vilifying the author’s least favored economic system.

The third explanation actually provides in-world reasons for the train’s existence.

Snowpiercer Wasn’t Meant to Save Humanity

If you, like us, fancy anti-scientific explanations as little as ideological ones but still want a sound backstory for why Snowpiercer, the last hope of humankind, was built as a train, risking thousands of lives and the most advanced species’ very existence… We got you. There’s a logical, justified, and in-world reason for that.

You see, Snowpiercer was never meant to become the new Noah’s Ark. Initially, there was just a train-obsessed billionaire who decided to make the coolest train for rich folks to travel around the world without the need to stop anywhere. He built the self-sustainable train and its entire ecosystem and infrastructure for fun, mostly.

When the Ice Age came around, humanity wasn’t prepared — but Snowpiercer was already there. There was little to no choice but to use it to survive, even though with such high stakes, a preemptively built underground facility would’ve suited humans’ needs much better. But beggars can’t be choosers; especially in the apocalypse.