THINK of rail services these days and you will probably picture people waving 'Stop HS2' placards or Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor of a Virgin train while talking about nationalisation.

The romantic image of trains as seen on classic films like Brief Encounter may be fading but Hannah Butterfield is out to prove that the possibilities of adventure on the rails are still very much alive.

Hannah is presenting a one-woman show called 21,000 Miles of Rail on Friday, October 14, at the Pyramid as part of Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival.

The 27-year-old got the idea after being awarded a BBC Performing Arts Fund Fellowship with the theatre group Third Angel.

She said: "I was becoming increasingly aware of the amount of time I was spending on trains.

"I can’t drive so travelling all over the place on trains has been my life for the past 10 years.

"It was a fascination with what travelling by rail used to be like compared to what it is like now. It seems to be worlds apart.

"It is the nostalgic in me. Obviously I can’t remember travelling around on steam trains but I was inspired by Brief Encounter. That is one of my favourite films.

"I think it is also the possibilities of adventure that train journeys can represent.

"Some of the routes that we have in Britain are so beautiful as well. And it’s the good vibe – it’s the meetings on the platform and saying goodbye on the platform that has that romantic side to it."

The show, which looks at how people interact with others on the daily commute, took shape after an unusual experiment: Hannah spent a day observing people passing through Leeds railway station.

"I was witness to all sorts of behaviours, coincidences, challenges and acts of kindness," added the Bradford resident.

"The thing that I think is really lovely is that everybody has a train story. No matter where you are or where you live everybody has got an interesting thing which happened to them on a train.

"My friend Joanna was on a train somewhere between Bradford and Halifax and she had earphones in so she missed an announcement.

"It said that the EDL (English Defence League) were going to board the train in large numbers and passengers were invited to get off and wait for the next train.

"So she had 12 minutes where she was crammed in a carriage with a lot of angry, racist people.

"That was a shocking one but it has become one of her favourite anecdotes because it was such an unusual occurrence.

"Then there are loads of romantic ones where people have fallen in love with someone they have been commuting opposite for the last 12 months and have finally had the courage to strike up conversation with.

Hannah's own story was when she was 16 and doing revision for her exams while she was on the train to visit her mum.

She added: "I was doodling on a page and then a boy sitting next to me started writing on my page as well.

"So we basically ended up in this non-verbal game through writing messages and doodling for 30 minutes.

"On what other occasion could that possibly happen with a stranger? It could have been the beginning of a friendship but it wasn’t."

21,000 Miles of Rail has been running for about a year now.

Meanwhile, Hannah has directed a show called Tanja alongside SBC Theatre which she hopes will change how people look at asylum seekers and refugees arriving into the UK.

She is also developing her next solo show called One Woman Band which is about self-employment.

Hannah said: "I’d done a lot of performing as a child in music, dance and theatre.

"Then in my undergraduate study I started to look at how performance can be so much more than characters and a narrative.

"I got really excited by the different ways you could have a live experience between a performer and an audience.

"A big thing for me was going to a number of theatre festivals in Croatia and Romania. I saw the open possibilities of the form theatre can take."

- 21,000 Miles of Rail will be performed at the Pyramid on October 14. Visit pyramidparrhall.com or call 42345 for tickets

DAVID MORGAN