Henry Poulaille's short story "The Mad Train," which appears in Transition magazine, No. 2, focuses on a train that is on its way to Paris.  The train's brakes have failed, so the engineer and the man feeding the coal into the engine continue to feed the fires so that the train can go as far as it can.  They are switched to a specific track, on which they are allowed to keep going until they either wreck or run out of fuel.  The engineer and the other man are constantly fearing that the track will not be kept clear and that the train will wreck.  Luckily, they finally run out of fuel and are stranded four hours from Paris. 

Poulaille's style of writing lends itself to surrealism in that it captures the aspects of a dream.  The beginning of the short story functions very much like an Imagist poem.  There is a heavy focus on description of the train itself, and what riding this speeding train is like.  Oftentimes, the train itself is given animal qualites as the engineer and the other man feed it coal and discuss how hungry it is.  At first the story has no real characters, as only the train and its trip is described.  This heavy description creates a dreamlike quality as everything is based off images. 

Also, the story doesn't have much of a plot.  It tells a simple story that focuses very little on the human characters themselves.  Throughout most of the story, we hear about the engineer and the other worker from an outside perspective, and we really only hear their dialogue.  Once in a while, we get a description of the people riding the train, but it isn't until the last page that we really hear much about them.  In these last couple of pages, we get a glimpse of the unconscious as being portrayed in the story.  At the end of the story, the passengers get off the train to find out what is going on, and the engineer tells them that the brakes have quit working and that they have ran out of fuel.  The passengers speculate on how long it will take for the railroad workers to come help them.  One of the passengers, who is a soldier specifically, states that he hopes they show up soon, but in his "business there are plenty of delays" (50).  While this is only a single line of dialogue, it functions much like the unconscious showing up within the story.  The train, much like the world during WWI, is tettering on the edge of destruction, but the war finally runs out of fuel.  The soldier (who helps us to see the connection to the war) is used to delays, so he is already skeptical and is doubtful about them reaching Paris on time.  While we are never specifically told that the train represents a world in the midst of a global war, there is that small connection that makes it seem like a dream that needs to be interpreted as such.