Contemporary internet film guide AllMovie praised John Alcott's cinematography, but concluded, ""Terror Train" is too mediocre a piece of work to raise interest from anyone but the genre's most devoted fans", "Time Out London" called it "better than most of its kind." Leonard Maltin concurred, claiming that the "stylish photography and the novelty of the killer donning the costume of each successive victim lift this slightly above most in this disreputable genre." Film scholar Adam Rockoff praised the film for its "style and oppressive atmosphere." Horror fiction scholar John Kenneth Muir also praised the film in his book "Horror Films of the 1980s", writing: "The thrill of a picture like "Terror Train" is the shrewd manner in which it plays against audience expectations; the sense that the slasher film paradigm gives it parameters which it can then undercut, subvert, and if needs be, violate."