There was a thread about this before, but I couldn’t find it.
I had two new sightings this week:
UHF - Michael Richards (Kramer) is a kid show host on a UHF station and starts an episode while surrounded by toy trains - pretty cool!
Mr. & Mrs. Smith - at one point, the Smiths, pursued by bad guys, go in the basement and Mr. Smith tears open some old toy train boxes and starts throwing cars all over the place, eventually revealing two backup pistols he had hidden there. This movie stunk, I thought.
I always liked the scene in “Risky Business” when Joel, Tom Cruise, retreats to his basement and plays with his trains while “the girls” are doing business upstairs. It’s a very brief shot but I think he sits down in front of a ZW and runs an EP-5 around the track.
The movie “The Hunter” with Steve McQueen has a couple of scenes of interest. He plays bounty hunter who collects old toys, so there is a little standard gauge as props on the shelves in his home. Another scene has him arresting a guy who has some MPC set up un a loop on the floor.
Another of my favorites is “Nothing But Trouble” with Demi Moore, Chevy Chase, John Candy, and Dan Ackroyd. The dinner scene is short but wonderful, as a loop of track pops up from a long oval table.
The opening of the movie “The Station Agent” has Peter Dinklage Working in a small train store, until his boss dies suddely.
In the original Godfather movie there is a scene when I believe the family’s lawyer steps out of a department store and for a second or to you can see in the window a Lionel 2037 or something along the lines of that chugging aways with a 262 crossing gate/flasher working. Can remember what else was in the window.
I’m sure everyone know about the scene in “A Christmas Story” when Ralphy and his friends are looking at the dept. store display in the window. Don’t remember what type of train it is off hand.
My favorite movie ever… “The Day the Earth Stood Still” The boy pulls a set out from under his bed on a board and runs them and then “Klatoo” tells him where he’s from trains run without any rails.
It was running on 3-rail track, which suggests Lionel or Marx rather than American Flyer, but I’ve never gotten a good enough look at the train to identify it any closer than that. There’s another scene in that movie where you can see what appears to be an American Flyer crane sitting on a shelf in the bedroom.
There’s a brief scene in Garfield where Jon and Odie play with a Lionel layout in the basement, powered by a ZW.
I pulled the list below off a previous post. This includeds movies with trains (not just toys).
I recently saw a Christmas movie on TV from about 1996. A single mother purchases a Lionel train for a add shoot and then can not return it. She is engaged to one guy and falls in love with the one who gets fired for letting her return it. It has several wonderful toy train shots but I can not remember the title!
Jim H
Train Movies
A Century of Lionel Trains
Bound for Glory
Breakheart Pass
Casey Jones TV show
Danger Lights
Disaster on the Coastliner TV
Emperor of the North
Exciting 100 mph Race to Chicago
Fahrenheit 451
Flame Over India
Fours a Crowd
Holiday Affair
It Happened to Jane
Love those Trains
Midnight Run Deniro
Narrow Margin
North by Northwest
Pacific 231
Rail Away
Rio Grande 1950’s
Runaway Train
Station Agent
Switch Back
The Chartreuse Caboose
The Christmas Story
The Denver and Rio Grande
The General Buster Keaton
The Great Locomotive Chase
The Greatest Show on Earth
The Iron Horse
The Lady Vanishes
The Molly Maguires 1968
The Polar Express
The Silver Streak 1934 Version
The Silver Streak Pryor
The Train
Toccata for Toy Trains
Tough Guys
U.S.2.:D.T.
Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
Union Depot
Von Ryan’s Express
Ya Can’t Win Em All
movies with real trains??
holy cow, i could name 100 others…
Around the World in 80 days
Bad Day at Black Rock (SP Daylight)
Cat Baloo
The Lady Killers
Some Like it Hot
Sullivan’s Travels
The Greatest Show on Earth (great train wreck)
White Christmas
It’s a Wonderful Life
Days of Heaven
Dr. Zhivago
The Great Escape
The Cassendra Crossing
Inherit the Wind
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Young Frankenstein
A Hard Day’s Night
The Grey Fox
My Little Chickadee
Next Stop Wonderland
Risky Business (the best sort of train ride)
Festival Express (trains and dr*gs and rock and roll)
Mad Max, Beyone Thunderdome (railbus?)
Groundhog Day (don’t drive on the tracks!)
Blazing Saddles (handcar)
…well i probably could name 75 more, but here’s a bigger challenge. find a movie set in the 30’s - 50’s that doesn’t have a train in it.
Hi guys
I like “The adams family” when his wife say “oh,oh he start to play with a Diesel”
and you can see the GP-9 runing…
And the house start to shake…
Andre.
Jim, That sounds like the made-for-TV remake of Holiday Affair. I’m not familiar with it, other than I know it was made around that time. The original movie is from 1949 and stars Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh. In it, Leigh is a mystery shopper who buys a Lionel set from a department store with the intention of returning it. Mitchum is the salesman in the store’s toy department who operates their large Lionel display layout. The plot is basically the same as the one you described. The train has Santa Fe F3’s and Madison cars, which have had their “Santa Fe” and “Lionel Lines” lettering changed to “Red Rocket Express”.
Another film with a great toy train scene that comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much from 1934 (not to be confused with the remake he did in 1956). The movie is about a couple whose teenage daughter is kidnapped by spies. There’s a scene where they are in the girl’s room. There is a large Hornby O gauge layout set up on the floor that the father is running, which includes numerous accessories. The train running on it is a Royal Scot 4-4-2 pulling a single bogie Pullman coach. We see painfully little of the trains, but what makes this scene so great is the dialogue. It starts out with the following:
Wife: Is that train electric?
Husband: Yes, 20 volts. Best present I ever gave the kid. She doesn’t play with it very much now, though.
Wife: She never did. You never gave her a chance.
A Christmas Story has been mentioned. In the department store window, the trains are prewar Lionel Hiawatha and M-10,000 s
I was just watching Nothing but Trouble this morning and was going to mention that condiment train! Hilarious scene! I love it when it shoots a pickle at the Brazilionairess!
Great list! I couldn’t find the older post with search.
One of the trains in the movie “A Christmas Story”, was a 1939 Lionel “Hiawatha” set. It was only pulling two cars. I’m not sure of the freight though. It may have had a Lionel steamloco, but the Nickel Plate Road caboose eludes me. I love the scene!
There was a train enthusiast episode of the Avengers I remember, where this old guy wanted to do away with all the cars so folks would have to take trains again - I think it ended with a chase on a 1/4 or 1/3 scale outside railroad???