Tough Guys was on earlier today and I just HAD to watch it all the way through. Even though they a used plywood mock-up to stand in for 4449, it got me thinking that it was a great crash scene. But of my other favorites from Silver Streak and Back To The Future III, which one was more believable and REAL not to mention couldn't have happened better?

Atomic Train.

It showed me that if I can make a fake train crash that's still more realistic than what they did, I've succeeded.

For a realistic depiction of train hitting a steel container, Hancock.

You may note I'm struggling to list a legitimate movie crash. That's because you just named all the good ones, and personal favorites as well

The Train. No mock-up. Did the real deal with that one.

Buster Keaton's The General (1926) back in the days when there were lots of old locomotives available for "sacrificial" parts in movies. Some of the "Civil War era" passenger cars were heavily modified retired Pacific Electric streetcars, made surplus by the arrival of "Hollywood" cars and Birneys.

As a child, I thought the whole steam locomotive scene at the end of Back to the Future III was impressive, sadly now I know that none of it makes any sense... boilers don't blow up that way, and I don't think they had air breaks or automatic couplers in 1885?

As for the flying steam locomotive... well that couldn't have been to good for the driving wheel axles...

The Fugitive with Harrison Ford.

I was thinking about "The Greatest Show on Earth" with the circus train crash.

Mark

Definitely "Silver Streak" with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. Had some great action shots using CP equipment. Funny movie too!

And the worst had to be that cinematic turkey with Sophia Loren and Richard Harris. What was the name of that God-awful film? A pair of Rivarossi H-O scale RS3's running off a bridge?

Richard, I think the movie you're thinking of might be "The Cassandra Crossing," which did have Loren but not Richard Harris; that instead was, if I remember correctly, Burt Lancaster. The setting was in Europe somewhere. The movie does have an impressive interior shot of an interlocking tower in what is supposed to be Switzerland.

Harris and Loren were in the remake of "Brief Encounter;" I haven't seen that one, but if there is a wreck in it, that might be what you have in mind.

I've never seen it, but there is supposedly a particularly cheesy wreck in the made-for-smellavision flick, "10.5," which features an earthquake fault chasing a passenger train and swallowing it up.

Three 1950s low, low, l-o-w budget science fiction wrecks come to mind. "The Giant Gila Monster" and "The Black Scorpion" feature attacks by their respective monsters on what are clearly Lionel trains, while a giant bird from space attacks an MDC-Roundhouse HO 0-6-0 on a freight in "The Giant Claw." The model train is apparently coupled with Mantua hook-and-loop couplers; the giant bird picks up the whole train and carries it off in a string, something that wouldn't happen with AAR couplers or anything else for that matter!

Finally, getting back to the "great" cinematic wrecks collection, we have to recall two by David Lean; "Bridge on the River Kwai," and "Lawrence of Arabia;" interestingly, both are acts of sabotage in wartime.

The fugitive wreck looked great as a well-done, full scale simulation of a buss vs. train accident ala Hollywood.
If you rent the DVD freeze the point where Harrison Ford jumps from the buss, you can easily see it’s a blue screen matt shot.
With CGI getting as good as it is I doubt you will see many more “real” crashes like this staged.

Story here.
http://www.wral.com/lifestyles/travel/v ... vid4102084

I think that "Runaway Train" with John Voight and Eric Roberts is very intense when their locomotive plows through the caboose of a train trying to enter a siding.

And there's always "Denver and Rio Grande" with two narrow gauge engines collding head on, augmented by cases on dynamite on the pilots. No cgi, no blue screen, one take only.

Great crash & great movie. Very atmospheric. Wouldn't have worked as well in color.

Back to preservation, Geo. Westinghouse demonstrated air brakes on the Pennsylvania Railroad in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in 1869. Eli Janey patented the automatic knuckle coupler about the same time. Universal adoption, of course, was not instantaneous.

A glimpse of what Frankenhiemer's "The Train" would have looked like in color was provided by a French television crew reporting on the movie when it was in production.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2pEvr32 ... re=related

The differences are interesting, one of them being the fall colors in the trees. It's also interesting, in both the completed form and this documentary, to note how water and coal move around in tenders in collisions.