Galaxy Express 999
Galaxy Express 999, 은하철도 999, 銀河鐵道999
Galaxy Express 999 (銀河鉄道999 Ginga Tetsudō Surī Nain) is a manga written and drawn by Leiji Matsumoto, as well as various anime films and TV series based on it. The manga is published in English by Viz. The number, "999", in the title is pronounced "Three-Nine", as opposed to "Nine-Nine-Nine" or "Nine hundred ninety nine".
The story of Galaxy Express 999 is set in a space-faring, high-tech future, where mechanized people with "machine bodies" are pushing humanity towards irrelevance and extinction. A street urchin named Tetsuro Hoshino desperately wants an indestructible machine body, giving him the ability to live forever and have the freedom that the poor humans on Earth don't have. While machine bodies are impossibly expensive, they are supposedly given away for free on the planet Andromeda, the end of the line for the space train Galaxy Express 999 (Technology has advanced to the point where space-faring vehicles can assume any shape, such as the classical locomotive in the story.).
Tetsuro meets up with a beautiful woman, Maetel (sometimes translated "Maeter", from the Greek mētēr and/or Latin mater, meaning "mother"), who is the spitting image of his dead mother. Maetel offers him passage on 999 if he will be her travelling companion. Tetsuro agrees. Another notable character in both the manga and the anime series is the seemingly strict, mysterious alien conductor, that sometimes gets involved in Tetsuro's and Maetel's adventures.
(Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. "Galaxy Express 999")
