The Railway Man begins with a gentle, whimsical encounter, the kind that often presages a mature romance onscreen. A reserved middle-aged man meets an attractive woman on a train travelling north. They gradually strike up a conversation around his extraordinary knowledge of the timetables. He is played by Colin Firth, she by Nicole Kidman. But this is no romantic comedy for the over-forties: this is the deceptively happy beginning of a film based on the extraordinarily dramatic life of Eric Lomax, as detailed in his acclaimed and well-loved 1995 memoir. As a 21-year-old Royal Corps of Signals engineer serving in Singapore in 1942, Lomax became a prisoner of the Japanese. Like thousands of other Allied soldiers he was compelled to work on the Thai/Burma railway, the “Death Railway&rd