Night Passage with James Stewart and Audie Murphy. Lots of D&RGW steam action!
Rick
“The End” just came on - it is now 10:29am MST. High Noon has just been introduced on the tube…
I was living in Colorado Springs when Night Passage was released in 1957 and, as could be expected, it opened with much hoopla in the state of Colorado; I was not into trains at that time but I got wrapped up in all that hoopla and grabbed my high school squeeze and went down and saw it. It did have some outstanding rail photography - the photography is, I’m afraid, considerably better than the story line.
Most of the railroad shots were made, as could be expected, in the Las Animas canyon North of Durango but there were some shots taken to the east in the Pagosa Springs area where the topography was more open. That area of the Rio Grande narrow gauge was still functional when this was filmed in 1956.
According to a fellow member of our Model Railroad club in Germany in the early '70s who had, by a quirk, been stationed at Fort Carson in those years, he and a fellow group of railfans from the Colorado Springs area stumbled onto the filming location one afternoon. They accidently eluded the security people with their WWII era Jeep and got a whole group of shots before they realized they had become part of the movie and got run off by the security people. They had, according to him, then shifted up track near where the photo runbys were beginning and got some more pictures. He did have some good photographs of the D&RGW narrow gauge taken down in Southern Colorado/Northern New Mexico which could only have been shot in that time period.
That film is ALWAYS worth watching, IMO. Beautiful Fall Colorado scenery, nifty Rio Grande trains and a darn good plot. It’s also available on DVD in wide-screen, which really opens out the action. One of the better railroad westerns I’ve seen.
Tom
Lots of mountain scenery, and views of ore buckets on cables too. An added bonus is Stewart singing.
Mark
I thought you were going to say “The Great Train Robbery” with Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. Victorian era, top hats, ladies in bustles (dang!) and ancient English steamers. I got to watch that last night in the hotel up at Sunday River ski area.