Hope this isn’t a repost, but I saw commercials tonight for Friday’s episode of Numb3rs. They didn’t reveal much in the short commercials, but it is supposedly about a terrorist/psycho targeting the country’s trains… sabotaging tracks, leaving buses in front of trains, etc… Seems pulled right out of the headlines with all the recent incidents, although I’m sure the episode was filmed months ago.
For thos who don’t know, Numb3rs is another in the long line of “police dramas”, like CSI, Law and Order, etc… Focuses on an FBI agent and his genius brother who solves crimes with math, basically.
I have been watching the show since the beginning, and usally like it, but not tonight. The story was goofy. Perhaps being a railfan ruined it for me. I thought a lot of it was pretty cheesy, especially slapping a radioactive sticker on a tank car. Oh well.
About the only positive note to this episode was the various shots of BNSF 1200, the natural-gas fueled switcher built by MPI. A 4.2% grade on Cajon was a pretty obvious screw-up since nobody could run 3000 tons on a grade like that.
The engineer’s attitude about riding it out and that joining the birds is dishonorable sounded more than a little like a captain going down with his ship.
I caught just a few minutes of the show. It looked like they were interrogating an engineer and trying to get him to tell the “truth” about a wreck. When the girl said “Isn’t it true that it was caused by a faulty brake line?”, I concluded that the writers probably didn’t know the difference between a train line and the space shuttle. Decided my ranking of the show would be somewhere below “The Brady Bunch”, left the TV and surfed the net for a while.
OK I just watched the show. I loved the railfan remark who supply’s the cops with the video of the van.
The reference to a Cajon Pass accident is very TRUE. I believed it occurred in 1989. The very quick version is the SPRR train was carrying a commodity to make glass. It orginated in Mojave destined for Colton then to LAX to be exported. One of he engines brakes on the consist was not operating when it left Mojave. But because the reported weight on the train was not so high the engineer decided to proceed. However, the clerk at Mojave had reported the incorrect weight. When they reached Palmdale 2 more locos were added to the rear end & one of those loco’s brakes also was inoperative. So once the train reached the summit & began the downhill all hell broke lose as the train became uncontrollable & became a runaway & finally derailed at Duffy St. in San Bernardino. You can contact the A & E network as they ran a program on it. You can also probably look it up on the NTSB web site. [;)]
They mentioned a number of real incidents - at least that part was somewhat accurate. The railfan probably looked like a lot of us really look (as opposed to what we think we look like). His attitude was about right, too…
I watched the show and was expecting it to have many inaccuracies and possibly be somewhat inflammatory toward the railroad industry. I wasn’t disappointed (how many times can you say “railroad negligence”).
I can understand why some of us don’t think a program like this is worth watching. If you’ve been a railfan for some time the things they get wrong stick out like a sore thumb. However, the average viewer won’t know what’s true or false. CBS News last week, then our local CBS affiliate a few days after, did stories on how juries were being influenced by the CSI tv shows. Realistically the items were little more than self-promotion for the shows. They did say some people watch these shows and because the shows are so realistic they think that is real life. The trouble is the real world sometimes comes up short compared to the TV world.
I watched for two reasons. Yes, one was to see the trains but more importantly to see how the railroad industry was portrayed to the general population. We brush off shows and movies like this at our own risk because it’s the image these shows present that get stupid regulation/legislation passed.
Jeff
We watched it, and found many mistakes. The producers didn’t count on such informed and observant “Train Spotters” watching the show.
Opening Scene: The kid is sitting on the floor; aren’t there three chairs in loco cabs?
Warehouse: I don’t think plasma TVs or computers would carried in boxcars.
Part where they went over photos from other wrecks: The CSX GE is stopped just past the broken bridge, with its cars over the bridge, standing normally.
Sacramento “Switchyard”: Nuclear waste would never be put in a UTLX tank car, never mind in the middle of a manifest; BNSF or UP would never let FBI agents in a yard without “Railroad Cop” escorts; only one yard engine is shown, wouldn’t such a big yard have more switchers?
The loco in the Cajon Pass derailment is #4404, an SR 11-12, with 4420 horsepower. They then show a set of BNSF GEs.
Actually have to disagree here, The FBI is the US’s top investigative division, they can go anywhere and any place they want to when persuing a lead. they do not have to answer to, nor do they require, the FRA’s rail police’s permission or assistance.
Belive me, when the FBI walks into your Yard and demands to see certain documents or to check certain cars, you better cooperate. nothing like a federal warrent and a simple indication that they can shut your whole yard down with a simple phone call to get you to cooperate.
As for the show, it was ok. yes it had some obvious flaws that serious train junkies would know, but the show is geared to the average citizen, who know little to nothing about our lovely trains. Now if it was a show on the history channel that blatenly made obvious mistakes, that would eb another matter all together.
Actually, that was an actual picture. The same picture was in either Trains or some other (lesser) railroad magazine about four months ago.
I thought it was pretty neat. When the bridge shifted beneath the train the rails held the cars in place. They simply tied the rails together–so they wouldn’t separate and have the car go between them–and slowly backed the cars off them. I bet there were some anxious moments in that operation.
I found it amazing that the rail was enough to hold the cars in place.
I watched it and do agree that it was stupid, but I suppose that it could have been much worse. The thing that really upset me is that they went on so much about how the railroads try to cover up accidents and are all totally corrupt and evil. I’m surprised that BNSF was willing to let them film in a yard of their’s and show an engine of their’s when they’re talking about the railroad covering up an accident that was due to negligent maitenance and paying off the widow of the dead engineer. This show wasn’t exactly good publicity for the railroad industry.
The other thing that I didn’t like was how they portrayed the young railfan that they interviewed at the railroad museum about these accidents. I wanted to throw a rock at the TV when he said to the girl (whom he’d only know for a few minutes and was with a guy), “Accidents are just one small part of railroad history. Perhaps you’d like to find out more over dinner?” We aren’t a bunch of geeky losers like that!
Also, did anyone notice…
When the guy is looking on the computer to find a train that’s close to the one involved in the wreck the saboteur was in, he tries to find simmilarities like number of cars, length of train, engine model, etc. As he’s saying these things, we see images of trains with this data being written on the screen. When he says “engine model”, we see “Engine Model: SR11-12” come on the screen. What’s an SR11-12? I wonder what kind of a locomotive that would be.
Closer to the beginning, they’re talking about the above-mentioned train. As they are, they’re showing different images of trains, simmilar to the above-mentioned sequence. One of the clips that they show is of a steam locomotive puffing lots of black smoke, pulling a freight across a bridge!
Don’t get worked up about it. There’s two things at work here:
Every last hobby is protrayed this way on TV. I’m not sure why. Video gamers complain about how TV protrays them. Astronomers do the same. EVERYONE does. I’m sure out there some stamp collector is complaining about how a stamp collector was protrayed in some sitcom episode.
Asking the girl out like that is a convention TV uses all the time. When you’re limited to something like 22 minutes for a half hour and around 47 for an hour long show, you have to make sacrifices in some parts of the dialogue. You just noticed it here because you were being more observant (and critical) than usual. You see this on sitcoms all the time. I mean think about it. A conversation with a girl that culminates in the guy asking her out is, in reality, can run a few minutes long. Let’s say it was a pretty short five minute conversation. Are you going to devote 11% of your running time to that? No, not even if it is important to the plot for him to ask her out.
I don’t watch the show and having seen it now can put aside any notion that I might be missing something. I watched it for the trains and got exactly the anti-corporate drivel one expects from the biased media. The most egregious shot was using the bridge accident in (I believe) Alabama as an example of RR negligence and duplicity when the accident was caused by a barge hitting the bridge and knocking it out of alignment.