The young Miloš Hrma, who speaks with misplaced pride of his family of misfits and malingerers, is engaged as a newly-trained train dispatcher at a small railway station near the end of the Second World War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

The idyll of the railway station is periodically disturbed by the arrival of Councillor Zedníček, a Nazi collaborator who spouts propaganda at the staff, though he does not influence anyone with it.

A glamorous resistance agent, code-named Viktoria Freie, delivers a time bomb to Hubička for use in blowing up a large ammunition train.

The next day, at the crucial moment when the ammunition train is approaching the station, Hubička is caught up in a farcical disciplinary hearing, overseen by Zedníček, over his rubber-stamping of Zdenička's backside.

In Hubička's place, Miloš, liberated from his former passivity by his experience with Viktoria, takes the time bomb and drops it onto the train from a semaphore gantry, which extends transversely above the tracks.

Zedníček winds up the disciplinary hearing by dismissing the Czech people as "nothing but laughing hyenas" (a phrase actually employed by the senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich[3]).

[5] Menzel's first choice for the lead role of Miloš was Vladimír Pucholt, but he was occupied filming Jiří Krejčík's Svatba jako řemen.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Closely Watched Trains "as expert and moving in its way as was Ján Kadár's and Elmar Klos's The Shop on Main Street or Miloš Forman's Loves of a Blonde," two roughly contemporary films from Czechoslovakia.

Crowther wrote:What it appears Mr. Menzel is aiming at all through his film is just a wonderfully sly, sardonic picture of the embarrassments of a youth coming of age in a peculiarly innocent yet worldly provincial environment.

[9]In his study of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Peter Hames places the film in a broader context, connecting it to, among other things, the most famous anti-hero of Czech literature, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, a fictional World War I soldier whose artful evasion of duty and undermining of authority are sometimes held to epitomize characteristic Czech qualities: In its attitudes, if not its form, Closely Observed Trains is the Czech film that comes closest to the humour and satire of The Good Soldier Švejk, not least because it is prepared to include the reality of the war as a necessary aspect of its comic vision.

However, it would be wrong to reduce the film to a coded reflection on contemporary Czech society: the attitudes and ideas derive from the same conditions that originally inspired Hašek.