It's short and to the point, boiling down to a big bang finale that might be straight out of an action movie within just over 100 pages, covering some very heavy subjects (war, resistance, holocaust) in between... and yet it manages to lull you into a false sense of security with its burlesque charm. Like all of Hrabal's heroes, the young train station attendant Miloš Hrma comes across as a pretty simple guy - both in the sense of not having any huge aspirations and in the sense of not being the sharpest tool in the shed - and the people he works with are a collection of originals who add to the at times almost obscene slapstick humour. The dispatcher is a casanova, the telegraphist a slut, the stationmaster doesn't care about anything but his pigeons, and Miloš is just trying to work up the courage to lose his virginity to the cute conductor on one of the trains.

It just happens to be winter 1945 and the Germans are all but running in orderly panic from the Eastern front, and many of them have to pass through the little Czech town where Miloš and his colleagues are required to keep the trains running on time. And the Czech resistance is starting to see the light in the tunnel, but you know what they say...

...It's just a freight train coming your way.