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Railway footage in feature films and television...


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Dr Terrors House of Horrors on Talking Pics TV right now and the opening scenes are at Paddington with 6995 Benthall Hall. Alongside stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee (it wouldn't be a horror film without those two) A very very young looking Donald Sutherland, Roy Castle(of Record Breakers fame), Bernard Lee and a host of other very familiar faces.

 

Good GOD!!! it even has Alan Fluff Freeman in it

Edited by jetmorgan
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The Wrecker (1929) features a genuine and very spectacular smash on the Basingstoke & Alton.

It was based on a stage play by Arnold "Ghost Train" Ridley and features an unscrupulous bus operator that puts the machinations of Pierce & Crump into the shade.

The clip below is not the complete film but seems to contain the highlights.

 

 

Edited by Andy Kirkham
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1 hour ago, Andy Kirkham said:

The Wrecker (1929) features a genuine and very spectacular smash on the Basingstoke & Alton.

It was based on a stage play by Arnold "Ghost Train" Ridley and features an unscrupulous bus operator that puts the machinations of Pierce & Crump into the shade.

The clip below is not the complete film but seems to contain the highlights.

 

 

Some great early railway footage, Sykes equipment and a whole heap of over acting, what's not to like  :)

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On 28/07/2020 at 17:37, 4069 said:

In 'Murder Must Advertise', made in 1973, one of the characters meets his end by being pushed in front of a train at South Kensington.

Just to say many thanks for solving the problem with long memory and assiduous research , and apologies for being late - I'm a relatively intermittent explorer of the wider RMWeb.  I, too, saw the original television programme and with my family and our 'local knowledge' we were intrigued by this tiny sequence as much as with the story-line.  No internet or replays then,  In the passing years it came again to mind when we encountered large-scale models of the 1913 and similar vehicles but couldn't correlate these to the 'live action' as we remembered it.

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If anyone is watching "The Main Chance" on Squawking Tinctures, a legal drama made by Yorkshire TV between 1969 and the early 70s, you'll know the title sequence has the "Main" (ho,ho) character sat in a first class Mk2 compartment with a brief dark shot of an approaching train.  Very nice but virtually invisible.  The black and white titles featured a Class 47 before cutting to the carriage mock up, correct for a Leeds bound train of the period.  However, now the titles are in colour, it features, as the approaching train hurtling into the gloom, that very Eastern region loco type, the "Western" diesel hydraulic.

You'd have thought with the distinctive aural cacophony that was the Deltic being familiar to Yorkshire TV executives who will have gone down to London for ITV network meetings on a regular basis, Yorkshire would have used that as a dynamic intro to the sequence rather than a loco more than 200 miles off route.

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On 13/10/2020 at 11:56, DY444 said:

There were episodes of A Touch of Frost and Inspector Morse which featured model railways, the latter in a house which was also filled with railway signs and other memorabilia.

That episode of Morse was on again yesterday (had it on in the background when I was, ahem, "working".  A young Alex Jennings playing the brewery chemist and railway enthusiast who still lived with his mother (but there the stereotype ended as he was dating the very attractive PA to the MD).  I'd love to know which layout was featured; it was certainly more than a quick expanded train set thrown together for 30s on screen.

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Pretty sure we've had mention of the 1967 film 'Up The Junction' already but I thought I'd post these screen grabs....

 

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Despite my deep seated penchant for all things Western Region I've always liked the idea of building a layout set on the SR in London in the '60s, using a colour palette just like the images from this fantastic old film ;).

 

 

Edited by Rugd1022
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I don't think I've posted these on here before. One of the short information films that Talking Pictures TV show every now and again. Sea to Plate - Billingsgate. I can't recall which port it was...most likely Hull.

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We watched a Poirot last night, The Blue Train. The coaches certainly looked like Wagon Lits but the ‘French’ loco looked very much more like a BR Standard rather than an SNCF 2-3-1…

 

steve

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8 hours ago, steve1 said:

We watched a Poirot last night, The Blue Train. The coaches certainly looked like Wagon Lits but the ‘French’ loco looked very much more like a BR Standard rather than an SNCF 2-3-1…

 

steve

 

Probably filmed on the Nene Valley

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15 hours ago, steve1 said:

We watched a Poirot last night, The Blue Train. The coaches certainly looked like Wagon Lits but the ‘French’ loco looked very much more like a BR Standard rather than an SNCF 2-3-1…

 

steve

Not one of their better efforts. I agree with Jools that it was probably the Nene Valley as they have a couple of CIWL vehicles but it's full of anatopisms and anachronisms. The loco is very distinctively British, the numberplate on the smokebox door is a dead giveaway and the Nord, like the SNCF later, put the number on or just above the buffer beam. The signals are also very distinctively British semaphores. The French adopted rotating vanes from us when their earliest railways were being built. What makes their mechanical signals distinctly different is that kept with them for most signal indications  while we went to semaphore arms. When Poirot has a conversation from the platform with a woman on the train and when he boards he's clearly on a platform at carriage floor height not the much lower height used in France.   The thing is that, though the typical audience member wouldn't identify points like those, added together  they would just lose the sense of actually being in France. They also presented le Train Bleu as being as heavily branded as say the VSOE is now, with specially designed menu cards etc. which it never was. Stupidly, when they showed the train running along the Mediterrranean coast towards Nice in a long shot as it crossed a viaduct (Antheor possibly) it was going in the wrong direction. The CGI wide shot of Nice station was also remarkably unconvibcing- you can see the join very clearly.

When creating scenes that an audience will find believable it's not actually necessary to be totally accurate in every detail but you do need to create the right overall impression. So, for example in The Day of the Jackal, the Jackal- after murdering for no obvious reason the countess or whatever she was- boards a train for Paris from Tulle. The station they filmed that scene at is not actually Tulle but I don't think that really matters. We see the Jackal boarding a train at a fairly typical French provincial station and that is believable. I doubt if one in ten thousand of the film's audience would have actually known it wasn't Tulle and even though I do, it didn't affect my acceptance of the scene one iota. 

Edited by Pacific231G
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This may have been mentioned before (I haven't got time to wade through the previous 46 pages although I'm sure that they're very interesting) but in one of the Endevour episodes Morse is looking for clues on a long disused branch line.  Funny that he didn't notice the shiny rails...

 

It was actually the Mid-Hants at Alton, but at the end of this 'long disused branch line', he's seen walking up the ramp and onto the platform at...Quainton Road.

Edited by 45669
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