[sigh] That’s the thing about how cruel our society can be. —> DARE TO BLAZE YOUR OWN TRAIL: if you fail then you’re branded a “flake”,…but if you succeed then they excuse you as “eccentric”…[:$]
Flake may have been too strong of a word for old Preston, but the blurb in the late 30’s PopSci left me with a “what the …” impression about the man.
There was another American car from the late 40’s that was at least as innovative as the Tucker and that was the Crosley. It had a very light weight overhead cam 4 cylinder engine, it was very easy on gas due to its overall light weight and later models had disk brakes. The car managed to stay in production until the early fifties.
Probably the person best known for “Daring to Blaze their own trail” in the RR industry was Robert Young of the Chessie and NYC fame.
- Erik
My neighbor had a Crosley, they were neat cars.
I always thought of Al Perlman as a self styled trail blazer
Has anybody seen the movie, yet?
From what I’ve read so far, the movie is a rather poorly made political tract that is attracting the true believers and other followers of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
The thread about the film on a local forum here is entitled “Looks like everybody shrugged.”
John Kneiling ,who had the long running “Professional Iconoclast” column in Trains, supposedly claimed he was the model for John Galt. If you read his column back in the day you could see the truth in the joke. He may have been one of the technical experts Ayn Rand consulted when learning about the industry.
I don’t know about Kneiling, but I believe Al Perlman was one of her contacts.
Glen
Okay: I’ve seen the movie. And as a result, I recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in railroads, in how they are managed, how they are run, and how they are seriously threatened as a business in the current mindset of the political arena. But I also recommend that you read the book first, and then go see the movie so that it makes more sense. The film had to cut some plot pieces to fit into only two hours (and this is just Part One of a three-part film if they can raise the money to do all three). The film was made on a very limited budget by a non-Hollywood studio, essentially one man’s money and his personal desire to get the story told and put it out there. As a result, the film has a number of major flaws. The biggest ones are (1) a lack of big name stars to draw an audience, and (2) a limited budget for creation of the world that is in Ayn Rand’s novel. Without a big budget the script they wrote had to “update” the 1957 story to the current era (sometime in the 2020s) instead of placing it in a film noir 1957-ish place where the world economic crisis could have been made more frightening with good CG effects. The film could even have been done in stark black and white. For anyone interested in railroads, the book’s use of steam locomotives that have been kept on main line roads, even though they are falling apart, because there is no money to buy new diesel motive power (and limited money for steam locomotive parts and maintenance) makes for great imagery. And in the book, steam engines play a huge part in several key scenes, primarily in the event surrounding the collapse of the Taggart Tunnel under the Rocky Mountains. The railroad charaters in the story are real, too: she does a good job of describing the railroad business, a much better job than most young modern authors do (most of whom know absolutely nothing about railroads or the railroad business). And you are correct: she DID talk to railroad industry rank-and-file workers and top managers to get her story. It shines through
How long did Bricklin make cars?