this Thursday night at 10 PM EST AMC will be airing the 'Locomotive' episode of their show Owners Manual, which was filmed at the Orange Empire Railway Museum.

I was just watching a clip on the AMC website showing two trains with the show's hosts at the throttle nearly crashing into each other.

The premise of the show is whether two guys (one consulting the 'owners manual', the other not) can accomplish tasks with all sorts of dangerous machinery, in this case historic railway equipment.

That near miss seems like a high price to pay for entertainment. I'd be interested in hearing from members at the museum about the experience of filming and producing the show and how much "reality" was even involved, i.e. was the near miss just plain old staged?

Its amazing how cookie-cutter these reality shows are, right down to the stock sound effects and suspenseful drumming often when absolutely nothing exciting is going on...

http://www.amctv.com/owners-manual/vide ... locomotive

I watched it last week, it was a follow up to the premier "Stunt Plane" episode. I was underwhelmed.....

It was probably staged and made to look worse than it was. not to mention that the whole purpose of the show is to see if one can operate something better with the "owners manual" than the one without. that being said they were using two different kinds of locomotives one being electric the other gas or diesel. they will both operate in different ways so its hardly fair like apples and oranges.

You should probably not believe everything you see on the T.V. Especially when it comes to "reality" shows.

In that case that was some lovely acting between the two hosts after the "near miss"

(yeah right...)

Luckily they had a camera boom truck in place to follow the run away caboose. That was a lucky coincident was it not? HA!

Finally got to (watch it with the volume on mute)

What a pointless show.

All of the reckless and dangerous behavior just made me very uneasy.

At least I got to see some of the OERM's collection.

Indeed. I lasted until the first commercial break. After the "drama" of the trolley challenge I had seen enough.

It's a sad commentary on the state of the world we live in when this passes for entertainment.

C.

How about we turn it around and use it for training? Haven't most of you had members that "think they know it" by just asking questions and those that "study" all aspects? At one point, one of the OERM personnel said "why aren't you writing this stuff down?" On the other hand, sitting and reading the manual to help you start up the engine without someone telling you what to do might not be a reasonable way especially if you have passengers waiting to get to town.

Then you also can teach with the one man sort of having the "cool" head and those just doing or punching buttons to see which one will start the engine. Was it proper for the guy to run after the caboose and the engineer just sit there waiting until he jumped on. What types of injuries might have occurred? What dangers were present? What would you do in the situation?

Another "teachable moment" was with the elderly fellows hanging around to talk. They wanted to help teach the "reckless" one, but he didn't really want to listen. Take that further and you have a rumor that the old guys don't want to work with the new ones.

I didn't look at this from the "reality game show" philosophy, because being with a railroad museum I knew there were all types of procedures one would have to take into consideration. But thinking it over after the show, I saw the potential every railroad museum could use for training and talking and education to young people.

The only thing I found lacking from this, is that it didn't come out and say railroads are dangerous. I think OLI could of had some very good commercials made to air in the breaks.