In the movie “Unstoppable”, Denzel Washington is chasing the run away train and is asked how much power he had. He replies 5000 horses. Pretty good for an SD40-2 which was the engine he was on.
Switching to books, I just finished reading, “The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad.” What do they show on the dust cover? A picture of a Pennsylvania Railroad steam train of the 1950s.
From what I’ve heard about that book, the blooper on the cover is a good indication of the book’s quality. I read Norris’s “The Octopus” as part of California history at Cal, didn’t find out to much later that the events in the book “based on” the Mussel Shoals incident was almost exactly the opposite of what actually happened.
Actually the book is pretty interesting and tries to be unbiased. It discusses the incident real and fictionalized at Mussel Sholes. The real point is the PR damage Hurst, Bierce and Norris brought to Huntington, the SP and the railroad industry in general.
Not on television, but In the movie “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera Ellen, they get on a train in Florida to travel to Vermont. Santa Fe all the Way.
Several years ago, I watched a murder mystery which supposedly was set on the Sunset Limited.
What I really remember is that the heroine had misplaced her key to her room in a sleeper. The only times I have needed a key was when I was riding in a Renaissance car on VIA’s *Ocean–*and I have ridden in many different sleepers.
The movie “Chattanooga Choo Choo” predictably featured Sierra 28 and environs, and included a scene shot on the Grizzly Flats property (Ward Kimball). No big deal there, other than the story was supposed to be set in the east.
The platform on which was displayed “New York City, Pennsylvania Station” clearly wasn’t. I believe all of the platforms there were underground.
While the interior of “Pennylvania Station” was very nice, it obviously the real deal, either.
In the movie Biloxi Blues, at the beginning the men leave on a train going over a bridge. At the end of the movie they return by train over the same bridge, but, the lettering on the cars are all backwards!
tree68 wrote the following post at 11-19-2012 5:38 PM:
The movie “Chattanooga Choo Choo” predictably featured Sierra 28 and environs, and included a scene shot on the Grizzly Flats property (Ward Kimball). No big deal there, other than the story was supposed to be set in the east.
The platform on which was displayed “New York City, Pennsylvania Station” clearly wasn’t. I believe all of the platforms there were underground.
While the interior of “Pennylvania Station” was very nice, it obviously the real deal, either.
At the risk of being picky, the quote above was from the guy who drove the red truck (I believe he was supposed to be a signalman) and he was trying to catch up to the head end of hte train so the “star” could jump onto the lead unit and shut it down…Sooooo, the “road” he was referring to was that on which he was driving…NOT the RAILroad!
Back to “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” The logical route would have been through Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee. The movie showed the Tennessee state line as being in open country; had the train gone through Bristol, it would have crossed the Tennessee line as it crossed State Street in the two cities (in downtown Bristol the state line runs down the middle of State Street, and the station was on the north side of State Street). Of course, there is the line in the song, “dinner in the diner, nothing can be finer than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina”–which seems to indicate that the train went through Asheville and then the Tennessee line would be crossed in open country. Again, the line may have had some poetic license in it.