From 1940 Ceri Richards was Head of Painting at the Cardiff School of Art and served in the Home Guard as a watchman during the bombing of Cardiff. He produced a number of paintings of the Welsh landscape at this time which can be seen to express a sense of the disruption and chaos caused by the war. This powerful painting of a menacing train hurtling through the landscape lies between abstraction, Surrealism and naturalism. The dynamic mechanical form of the train can be seen as a metaphor for the cataclysmic impact of technology during the war, yet the picture would also seem to make indirect reference to the cyclical processes of nature, a theme that preoccupied Richards throughout his life. The painting has a Surrealist inflexion that was influenced by the art of Max Ernst, in particular the painting 'La Mariée du Vent' (The Bride of the Wind) (1926) that Richards had bought in 1938.