I was thinking back to all of the places I have been to and one particular trip got to me. It was in the summer of 2001, and I was on a trip to Florida with my parents and grandparents. We stopped at a hotel/casino resort in Tunica MS. I remember the name of the casino was the Hollywood. They had a bunch of memoribilia from various movies. I have pictures of some of the artifacts stored away somewhere.
I remember one particular display that caught my eye. It was models of trains that were used as backups for the movie Under Siege 2 starring Steven Seagal. It is a great movie. The models of the passenger cars were about 5 long and were extremely detailed. The tank cars were a little shorter and carried a small tank that held butane for the explosions.
Any other movies that employed the same kind of technique with model railroading?
The Fugitive. In a scene where Han Solo is running and a train crashes off the tracks behind him, that’s a model. I don’t know the scale, but the guage looks like its about 10", and the engine looks like it was 30" high. I know those numbers aren’t right, but I’ve only got a small picture to look at, and there’s a guy kneeling down with an engine that goes up to his chest.
In Titanic, there’s a scene with the boat at the dock, and a train and some buildings in front of it. The buildings are models, but the train is made from photo cutouts because it was too expensive to buy a lot of large models, so they bought a few, took photographs and could then duplicate as many cars as they needed.
That would be Harrison Ford as Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard.
The scene was inter-cut between models and 1:1. In fact, I recently saw some posted pictures of the rusting loco shell and the bus (in Dillsboro, North Carolina) where the live action from this scene was filmed. They just left them there after staging the crash.
I read that the landscapes overflown in “Flight of the Intruder” were all done in N-scale.
He was obviously channeling Han Solo. According to a book I’ve got on Special Effects, they shot the wreck with miniatures, and played it back with Ford acting the scene out in front of the projection. I’m sure the shots before and after the wreck were 1:1. I’m sure it’s way more complicated than that. It’s a process called “introvision”. They’d probably do it differently now, but that was a few years back.
There was the climactic scene as I recall in one of the Zorro movies where a train crashes off the end of a dead-end spur. The special effects were as convincing as pushing an LGB engine into a sandbox.
In regard to the above, shortly after the movie appeared TLC, or some such, had a one-hour TV show on how these railroad models were constructed and how the wreck scene in the movie was staged (the bridge in the wreck was 20’ or so tall and perhaps 40’ long!). The size and degree of detail in which the models were rendered was equally impressive.
As to other movies in which RR models were employed, who can forget the spectacular wreck of the Ringling Bros. circus train in the 1952 film “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
The scene in Tough Guys was a 1" scale live steam model of a Daylight crashed into a pan of graham cracker crumbs to resemble dirt. The post-crash scene was a plywood mockup of #4449. It was one of many model crashes done by the late Jack Sessums. There is a great feature on the DVD “The Magic of Grand Scale Railroading” available from Grand Scales Quarterly about Jack, his 15" gauge railroad and his special effects company. It also has a list of all the movies that they did special effects for, including that subway car crash that lasted forever in “Speed”.
If you have the DVD for “Shanghai Noon”, it has a nice special feature on the making train crash scene, looks like they used 1.5" scale, 7.5" gauge for that.
We have a western town scene on our HO scale club layout that consists of buildings given to us by a former Hollywood stunt man who said they were used as props in many western movies in which he appeared.
Yes, the model in Back to the Future III was either a 1" or 1.75" live steam model of the Sierra Railroad #3, which was the full-scale locomotive used elsewhere in the film.
A similarly scaled model of a Denver and Rio Grande K-27 was ‘wrecked’ for a scene in a very funny 1970’s western called THE GOOD GUYS AND THE BAD GUYS.
One terrific railroad film that didn’t use scale models for the wreck scenes was THE TRAIN. Director John Frankenheimer wrecked full-scale French locomotives for that one.
Cant believe no one mentioned that movie, what was it called? with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. The one where the F unit smashes through Grand Central Station.
Back in the Monochromatic (1940s) the Saturday Morning Serials used a lot of (cheap) model work for all kinds of alleged disasters. There were so many giveaways that even grammar school students could catch them.
The most obvious sign that it was faked was the models rolling or flipped end-for-end, then coming to rest undamaged. Also, the fake explosions (half an ounce of black powder in a flash pan - long drawn-out BO-o-oom over the audio system.)
James Bond also used a model in Die Another Day when the russian train, that seems to resemble PRR 4-4-4-4 to me, crashes into the tank and goes kaboom. If you watch when the train goes you can tell its a miniature as hollywood calls it. There was one other one I was going to mention but forgot when I started typing. I was going to make some attack of the gaint cat movies when I finished my smallish N scale starter switching shelf, but she’s not doing good right now and may not be around then. She won’t, and when she does it eats people food, the only thing she will eat, and no more than a feq bites. She’s got us pretty worried, adding more stress me and the wife don’t need right now.
