The idea for Terror Train (1980) came from a dream that Daniel Grodnik had. One weekend night after seeing the films Halloween (1978) and Silver Streak (1976), Dan woke up and said to his wife, "What do you think about putting Halloween on a train?" His wife answered, "That's terrible". He jotted down "Terrible Train" on a piece of paper on his nightstand. In the morning, he changed the title to "Terror Train", wrote up 22 pages, and made a deal on it with Sandy Howard's company at 3:00 in the afternoon.
The train was rocked back and forth on a rig inside a warehouse in order to simulate train locomotion.
The opening prologue of the college bonfire was the very last scene of the movie to be filmed. It was added during post-production around one month after principal filming ended as a tie-in to the origins of the character Kenny Hampson.
Magician David Copperfield once said of this movie that he appeared in: "Film is a magnifying glass for magic, so I had to be very careful. What you see on screen is exactly what the extras saw during shooting."
Jamie Lee Curtis shot this film back to back with the similarly themed slasher film Prom Night (1980) in late 1979. PROM NIGHT in Toronto, in August and September 1979 and released in July of 1980, and TERROR TRAIN in Montreal in November and December 1979 and released in October of 1980.