Railway footage in feature films and television...

[rodent279]

Watching White Christmas, 1954 Irving Berlin classic, with Bing Crosby & Danny Kaye.

Some train scenes earlier in, as they travel overnight from Miami to Vermont. Some railway bloopers in there, not that I'd noticed until I looked at this:-

 

https://cs.trains.com/ctr/b/mileposts/archive/2019/12/19/what-if-bing-and-danny-really-took-the-train.aspx

[fulton]

Maybe already covered, as I only dip into this thread, just watched the film , The House of the Spirits, with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, set in South America, railway scenes filmed in Portugal, nicely done as film set over 45 years, first railway shot small steam loco with two vans and one teak coach, second shot larger steam loco and think four or six wheelers, final shot Alco diesal with two bogie coaches.

[Clive martin]

Me and my wife have been watching the latest series of the crown guilty pleasure! Their has been quite a few bits of royal train footage filmed on the west highland line depicting the late 1960s early 1970s often filmed from a drone useing a rail blue class 37 and maroon coaching stock as a representation of the royal train,in one scene a brief head on shot of the class 37 it looked like the producers had computor generated headcode discs and doors on the  37 to make it look like a class 40,quite a good bit of reasearch on the part of the tv production team as 40s did often haul the royal train in the late 60s early 70s!

[APOLLO]

May have already been posted, but worth watching.

 

 

Brit15

 

[Rugd1022]

On 01/01/2023 at 19:58, APOLLO said:

May have already been posted, but worth watching.

 

 

Brit15

 

 

Haven't watched that for a while - thanks for sharing it again! Budd was a genius, his score for the film was perfect... despite being shot in late Summer time it's one of the bleakest films ever made...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rugd1022]

I've been watching the first series of 'Softly Softly Task Force' on dvd this week, there's the odd bit of railway footage here and there (mostly in Kent around the Thames estuary area) but there are some very nice shots in the last episode 'Escort' filmed at Beaconsfield station in early 1970.

[john new]

Watching the Howards’ Way repeats, not for the plot really but I used to visit the area around Hamble regularly so more for the scenery. Point of post - Series 1 Ep 2 nice shot of a 3H DMU on the pre-electrified line through Bursledon. It doesn’t matter plot wise but it runs in power car leading, but the shots with the actors must have been shot on a different day (or even location?) as it departs behind the cast with the power car at the trailing end.
 

The sort of continuity boob 99.5% of viewers would miss and doesn’t really matter.

[russ p]

20 minutes ago, john new said:

Watching the Howards’ Way repeats, not for the plot really but I used to visit the area around Hamble regularly so more for the scenery. Point of post - Series 1 Ep 2 nice shot of a 3H DMU on the pre-electrified line through Bursledon. It doesn’t matter plot wise but it runs in power car leading, but the shots with the actors must have been shot on a different day (or even location?) as it departs behind the cast with the power car at the trailing end.
 

The sort of continuity boob 99.5% of viewers would miss and doesn’t really matter.

 

Things like that only increase Dixons shares value as people like me need to replace their TVs after putting their feet through them 😀

[Compound2632]

29 minutes ago, russ p said:

Things like that only increase Dixons shares value as people like me need to replace their TVs after putting their feet through them 😀

 

Evidently you are in a very small minority of viewers, as Dixons went out of business a decade ago. (So your post also reveals that you yourself are not, in fact, driven to such a response more than once a decade!)

[Hobby]

Strictly they didn't actually go out of business, they bought Currys and the Dixons brand was High Street and Currys out of town retail parks, they just shut down the High Street shops and took on the Currys name as their trade name, so they are actually still going, just under a different name...

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixons_(retailer)

[Steamport Southport]

Also Carphone Warehouse when people haven't really had car phones for years!

 

 

[luckymucklebackit]

Just watched a humdinger on Netflix.  "The Last Passenger"  The film is a thriller set on-board two Class 421 “4-CIG” EMU carriages (numbers 76747 and 62385 from unit 1399). Despite the coaches used, artistic licence was taken and the carriages were portrayed as diesel powered for the purpose of the storyline.

There is so much wrong with this film yet the producers went to great lengths to shoot it, including trucking two carriages to the studios and setting them on a jig with various hydraulics to simulate motion

 

Jim

[John M Upton]

I saw that one on DVD.  Embarrassingly awful, I couldn't stop laughing....

[Ben B]

There's something filming on my local line at the mo, the KWVR... Keighley Station is now 'Great Central', the two Pacers have been trundling about in custom re-liveries, the Railfreight class 20 pottering about with engineering stock, and the other night a 50 with a rake of repainted mk.4's arrived off the mainline. Someone must be throwing some serious money at it, though I wonder if it will be set in the 90's or its just a case of 'as close to present day as we can manage on a heritage line'. That said, it's only really the Pacers and an engineers brake van that don't have examples in revenue service in 2023 I think...

[steve1]

Anyone else have a good laugh at Silent Witness visiting the Severn Valley Railway?

 

steve

[Northmoor]

41 minutes ago, steve1 said:

Anyone else have a good laugh at Silent Witness visiting the Severn Valley Railway?

No, but I find the whole concept of Silent Witness so laughable I avoid it anyway.

 

Last night I watched part of an episode of "Return of the Saint" with Ian Ogilvy.  It involved a woman on a train witnessing a murder, so plenty of shots of the derelict industrial location alongside the 4-track GWML, with a HST and a few BR blue 3-car DMUs.

[MyRule1]

1 hour ago, steve1 said:

Anyone else have a good laugh at Silent Witness visiting the Severn Valley Railway?

 

steve

If you are referring to this week's episodes it's not the Severn Valley and has been discussed here

 

 

[The Border Reiver]

The Flying Scotsman is on Talking Pictures on Thursday

[steve1]

1 hour ago, MyRule1 said:

If you are referring to this week's episodes it's not the Severn Valley and has been discussed here

 

 

 

Oops. I was distracted by the headrests in the Mk 1 Open that had SVR marked covers.

 

Having been to all the railways mentioned, I should have known better.

 

steve 🤭

[DK123GWR]

4 hours ago, Northmoor said:

Last night I watched part of an episode of "Return of the Saint" with Ian Ogilvy.  It involved a woman on a train witnessing a murder, so plenty of shots of the derelict industrial location alongside the 4-track GWML, with a HST and a few BR blue 3-car DMUs.

I never realised that there was so much going on behind the scenes of 2999's construction! Just a shame the program didn't spend more time looking at the loco...

[RJS1977]

16 hours ago, steve1 said:

Anyone else have a good laugh at Silent Witness visiting the Severn Valley Railway?

 

steve

 

Yes, I watched it having seen a notification about it on the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway's website (the only bit the C&PR were involved in was the level crossing where the emergency command centre was set up - all the railway action was filmed on what I immediately recognised as the Nene Valley).

 

Although I didn't watch the whole episode - just the railway scenes - I was somewhat confused by the continued mention of a "train crash" as all we actually saw was a train making an emergency stop in a tunnel (and running over someone with an injured leg in the process). I gather there was some idea of a bomb having gone off in the tunnel, but this wasn't really observed on screen.

 

As the locomotive involved was a Class 46 (pulling Mark 1s), I'm sure there must be some old footage out there that could have been used to portray a more realistic "accident", albeit that the Mark 1s would have been a different livery.....

[DY444]

On 25/01/2023 at 07:39, Northmoor said:

Last night I watched part of an episode of "Return of the Saint" with Ian Ogilvy.  It involved a woman on a train witnessing a murder, so plenty of shots of the derelict industrial location alongside the 4-track GWML, with a HST and a few BR blue 3-car DMUs.

 

.. and the opening dining car interior sequence filmed in a 4BEP Buffet car

[H2O]

1979 b/w film "Radio On" that was on tv a few months ago^.

 

If you can keep watching, the second half features some railway locations around Bristol.  A station probably on the severn beach line and a railway in the background of an industrial estate (east of Temple Meads?).

 

The final scene is the lead character crossing the tracks in front of an approaching DMU. He gets on, the train departs and the crossing gates open.  This is not in Bristol but at Blue Anchor on the WSR which presumably allowed them to have him on the tracks.

 

Having grown up in Bristol it does reflect what it was like in the less glamorous areas.  If this film was your only view of Bristol I don't think you'd be very impressed!

 

^ Quick film review: Main character goes to Bristol to discover more about his brothers death, meets various characters on his travels, film ends with him gaining little meaning from what he has seen and heard - a feeling many viewers will also share.

 

Much of the above also posted in Changing face of Bristol as many general scenes showing the city.  Thought it worth posting here as it features a few specific railway scenes too.

[jetmorgan]

Screen grabs from the 1951 film Lady with a Lamp. Just a very short scene at a railway station, don't know the location, and Lion hauling some Liverpool Manchester style coaches.

[Nick Holliday]

20 hours ago, jetmorgan said:

Screen grabs from the 1951 film Lady with a Lamp. Just a very short scene at a railway station, don't know the location, and Lion hauling some Liverpool Manchester style coaches.

According to IMDB website, the scene was filmed at Cole Green station on the GNR Welwyn to Hertford branch.

image from the Disused Stations website