Platforms

On a Tuesday evening in October 2026, an ordinary Great Northern train leaves London King's Cross for Cambridge. The journey begins on familiar rails, among the routines of an evening service. Welwyn Garden City is the last normal stop. Beyond it, the railway remains physically recognisable, but the platforms begin to belong to moments the passengers should never be able to reach.

Names, dates and the people waiting at stations no longer fit the journey they thought they were taking. The train is moving through histories that should be inaccessible, carrying its passengers beyond the assumptions that make a timetable useful. Staying aboard means continuing into the unknown. Each stop offers fresh evidence that the familiar railway can no longer be trusted to lead through a familiar world.

There is one apparent destination that still promises a return: King's Lynn at 20:26, back in 2026. Reaching it becomes the possibility around which survival must be organised. But a destination is not a guarantee. Between the passengers and that arrival are stations they cannot treat as ordinary interruptions, and people whose presence may carry the danger of the times the train is passing through.

A platform is a boundary, a place where those inside meet those outside. On this journey, that boundary keeps opening. What waits beyond the doors matters as much as where the rails lead, and the people still aboard must survive what boards along the way. Knowing the year they need to return to does not tell them what will arrive at the next stop.

Platforms turns an evening rail journey into a supernatural passage through impossible histories. Home appears to exist at the end of the line, at a precise time on an ordinary clock. Getting there requires the passengers to endure everything the railway has placed between their departure and their return.