I just caught, out of the corner of my eye, a commercial for NBC's new sci-fi post-apocalyptic thriller "Revolution" featuring a steam train (quite real-looking, albeit smallish, on the order of a long-stacked shortline loco or whatnot), plus the requisite explosions, etc. Airs Monday night at 10 PM, 9 Central/Pacific.

http://www.nbc.com/revolution/

Any ideas on what we're watching this time around, since we were so good in picking out Travel Town in advance of "America's Next Top Model"?

I haven't watched the show at all (frankly, the overall premise is so silly that I can't get past it) but after seeing the initial commericals I started thinking what skills would suddenly go from being used only at museums to being used everywhere. I immediately thought of steam transport for that reason. Boiler operation would be a skill most sought after in such an impossible reality.
Anyone ever see the 1990s remake of the movie, "On the Beach" where a post-WW3 Australia is waiting for the fallout to reach them and kill the last humans on Earth? There's a scene of a suburban commuter station and a train pulled by steam shows up!

Educated guess is that the engine in the commercial is H&B #44 at the South Carolina Railroad Museum. Looks like that grey "baggage car" behind the engine in the commercial is doing all the actual work.

So they make a show about modern technology going dead and people using steam trains so they use a dead steam engine being pushed by modern technology to film it. Perfect logic.

I've never watched it but has this show ever mentioned what happened to the literal MOUNTAINS of bodies you'd have after about two weeks of no power?

The locomotive does belong to South Carolina Railroad Museum. I believe it was transported to somewhere in North Carolina for filming purposes.

That scene is in this weeks upcoming episode.

Mr. Ed

The premise of the show is silly. Loss of electricity would not return everyone to bows and arrows. Worst case would be a return to life style of 1880.

Many people would die, but the remainder would settle into Victorian life. But it really would not be that bad, because you can take away the electricity, but you can't take away the cumulative education of the past 100 years. Just the awareness of hygiene alone would be an enormous difference.

its ironic, here around the South Bend area/ Elkhart, go south a little bit
and you immediately run into Amish country, no electricity use.

The culture exists today.

Yes, it is the engine from the SC Railroad Museum. We were approached about the opportunity, but seems the storyline called for a tender to play a role and we don't have one. I think it was filmed down near Conway, SC.

Say, a diesel engine does not necessarily require electricity, right? If you can spin it with compressed air, it fires without spark.

edit: and a glow plug engine too

A diesel may not technically require electricity, but unless you do have an engine with air start, and also have an engine with a mechanical or hydraulic transmission, it's not going to be useful in the scenario this program is supposed to have.

This also means no signal system, no communications between stations (not even by telegraph), and a reversion to oil headlights :-)

How come we can't get a decent movie or television series with a good railroading background?

You should read "Dies the Fire", a scifi novel (actually, a whole series of novels) by S. M. Stirling, that follows much the same premise. Stirling's books also include further changes to the laws of physics which cause all "high energy" reactions to be suppressed, including explosions (dynamite, gunpowder, gasoline, nuclear) and a further bizzarre change which changes liquid and gas pressure/volume relationships which unfortunately prevents steam power from working!

The main problem with the complete loss of electricity is loss of the ability to refrigerate, cook, or transport food, not to mention loss of water supplies for about 90% of the people in the world. While you're trying to "settle into Victorian life", people are starving by the millions. Civilization collapses and rapidly things rapidly go downhill from there.

At least in Stirling's books, people eventually settle into a simpler life, but the vast majority of people starve or are killed before the survivors get to that place. I think that's probably fairly realistic.

Humbug. There is plenty of food in America, least, if you like corn. It would just stop going into E85 and animals.

The real problem is a steam problem. A bunch of electricity plants would suddenly become steam plants. At 500 Locations worldwide, what a few mad geniuses do in the dark in the first 20 minutes, would decide whether that community has a nigh-unlimited supply of dirt cheap steam forever, or a 100 mile exclusion zone around it. If that location has several units, then each unit must be saved or all units are lost.

There were non electric telegraphs, sometimes called heliographs, before Samuel Finley Breeze Morse. A. Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo", unabridged edition, has a description of a French government network. The American early railroading version was called "Smoke Signals", possibly adapted from the American Indian version.
Now, if the Sun was to fail.....

OK, how do you get these mass quantities of corn into major metropolitan areas without transport? By the time you figure it out, chaos will have ensued and a significant number of people would be dead.

Hopefully you can rig up air or cartridge starters for your tractors, harvesters and trucks by the next farming season (in "Revolution's" scenario- no such luck in "Dies the Fire" because your diesels won't work) and maybe you can sustain mass production agriculture, but the first year or so is gonna be nasty business.