Television shows and the Railroads

[switch7frg]

Fairy Tales were the best the  TV had to offer at that time. But Iam still too old to believe in Fairy Tales................

[wanswheel]

     

Univac looking a little different two years later, Douglas Edwards about the same

CBS founder William S. Paley

 

Walter Cronkite of course

Eric Sevareid and Mr. Paley’s bow tie

Ike is winning again.

Bill Downs

Blair Clark

Manually-operated tally board

Rust Belt’s substantial electoral clout

[Semper Vaporo]

Our smart(aleck)phones may have more computting power than that univac, but they just don't have as much wow factor in switches and lights!!!

[tree68]

wanswheel

Live from Grand Central Terminal, it's Election Night 1954! starring Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards and Charles Collingwood.

 

Our smart phones today have more computing power than that Univac...  

[wanswheel]

http://www.craneco.com/Category/28/History.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Clooney

[wanswheel]

Live from Grand Central Terminal, it's Election Night 1954! starring Walter Cronkite, Douglas Edwards and Charles Collingwood.

[Firelock76]

Interesting, that cross-section makes me think of a medieval cathedral, or the Sistine Chapel at least.

[wanswheel]

At the front of Grand Central are 3 arch windows, 2 rectangle windows and 2 oval windows. The top 5 rows of panes in the arch windows, the top 2 rows of panes in the rectangle windows and the oval windows are to the room occupied by CBS studios, labeled 'H' in this diagram:

Center window in 1937, right above the statue of Commodore Vanderbilt.

 

[vsmith]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7_-N_zTJnk

"forget about your cares its time to relax at the junction...'

[Convicted One]

How could you guys forget this little gem,  part of which was in the opening credits on EVERY episode?

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

I've seen a scene on "CSI: Miami" involving a car smashed at a grade crossing and the locomotive was obviously from Pacific Harbor Line.  Also a closing sequence from "Criminal Minds" in which the serial killer and his girlfriend took their lives jumping in front of a Metrolink train in LAUPT.

[Georgia Railroader]

Also if you remember the Dukes of Hazzard in the early seasons where the General Lee jumps the tracks in the opening credits, that was also filmed in Covington on what was at the time the Southern Rwy.

[Georgia Railroader]

SALfan

BaltACD:

'In the Heat of the Night', if my memory is still any good, had its 'location' scenes filmed in and around Decatur, GA which is on CSX's Georgia Road between Augusta and Atlanta during the early 1990's when there was much equipment still running in their 'fallen flag' colors..

choochoobuff:

I have recently been watching old reruns of In the Heat of the Night on WGN. I never really watched it while it on the air during it's run. What I have noticed is the amount of railroad related items featured in the show. Of course, the first is the appearance of the Amtrak rolling past during the opening credits. I have also noticed a old diesel, possibly a road switcher, still wearing it's C&O paint scheme. Also, a scene in which a CSX and a SCL head up a consist. Evidently these are all pieces of the companies "adopted" by CSX. Does anyone else remember any shows in which actual railroads could be seen frequently?

 

 

I thought it was filmed in Social Circle, GA, but I could be wrong.  Pretty name for a town, anyway.

There were some scenes filmed in Social Circle. Many scenes were filmed in Covington. You can see the Great Walton RR in the background with the WM 6400 with full Chessie paint. They also had a GP 9 with full C&O paint that I think appeared as well. I can remember seeing the film crews filming all around the town I grew up in as well as Covington and Social Circle.

[Andrew Falconer]

Somebody get a hold of Rickey Gervais, Executive Producer of "The Office".

They have to shoot an episode of "The Office" in Scranton, PA at the real National Steamtown Museum.

Andrew

[tree68]

One episode in particular of the show "Emergency" probably took place in that district.  I recall that Chet - an apparent master of a number of trades, was called upon to move a locomotive.  I don't have my tapes (from the air) indexed, so I don't know any more details.

[rrnut282]

Just about every detective/cop show shot in the 60s-80s had at least one episode shot in the warehouse district in LA with the spider-web of tracks in the pavement.  Most had SP or SF boxcars in the background and some even had a switcher roll by.

[wanswheel]

 

Excerpt from Sincerely, Andy Rooney by Andy Rooney

Edgar Tafel, Architect

Dear Edgar,

Good luck with your book about Frank Lloyd Wright. I know you are a protege.

I was working as a writer for one of those CBS morning television shows in about 1956-57 when Will Rogers, Jr. was its reluctant star. We did a lot of interviews and Frank Lloyd Wright agreed to come to our studio one morning. The studio occupied a big section of Grand Central Terminal on the third floor above and parallel to 42nd Street. Three tennis courts now occupy the space we used for a television studio.

Our offices were in the Graybar Building north of Grand Central and connected to
it. We walked from there, across the glass catwalks on the third floor at the
end of Grand Central, to the studio.

I was commissioned to pick up Frank Lloyd Wright. I was in awe of him and delighted with the assignment. I was greeted at the door of his suite at the Plaza by a young man and shortly thereafter by Mr. Wright's wife. They had redone the hotel living room so that it was unrecognizable as a hotel room. It had one huge oriental rug that went up and over everything in the room . . . chairs, sofas, tables, everything.

When he was ready we went down to the waiting limousine. Wright grumbled about everything during the drive from the Plaza to the Vanderbilt Avenue side of Grand Central. He detested New York. I agreed with him about some things, but I love New York - especially Grand Central - but I wasn't going to argue with a grand master of design.

There was access by elevator to our third floor studio but I decided to force a tour on this crusty old genius. I took him down the marble steps off Vanderbilt and walked him kitty-corner, past the clock in the center of the waiting room, to the elevators in a little hall on the north side toward Lexington Avenue. This bank of elevators went when they tore down the Terminal Building to put up the Pan Am Building. I recall clearly that when we got to the elevators toward the Lexington Avenue side, Wright stopped and looked back across the busy room. Five thousand people were going in every direction. The sun's rays were slanting down toward the information booth from the windows above where the Kodak picture is now. "It is a grand building, isn't it?" he said, almost apologetically and I accepted it as a retraction for all the terrible things he'd been saying about everything else in the City.

We went to the third floor on the elevator and started across the catwalk. You've done that, haven't you? It's one of the great sights in New York City. Thousands of purposeful people going their own directions and with doors and stairs and levels enough for all of them crisscrossing Grand Central Terminal. Midway across, Wright stopped and neither of us said anything. He must have stood there for more than five minutes, and I didn't speak because I knew nothing I had to say could match what he was thinking. I finally had to tell him we were due very shortly in the studio and he reluctantly finished his crossing of the catwalk. The whole incident gave me a great feeling because I thought I'd had some affect on Frank Lloyd Wright's opinion of my city and I know he could never think completely negatively about it again after his visit to Grand Central.

[wanswheel]

Excerpt from Interview With Ralph Bellamy by Dina-Marie Kulzer

''Television in those days was interesting. It was a whole new field to begin with. We shot our show on kinescope, and of course, T.V. not having developed, there was no chain across the country. They mailed the kinescope to all the other towns that used it," reminisced Bellamy about the birth of television."We did Man Against Crime from Grand Central Station in New York. None of the studios had been prepared for television at the beginning. And they had been experimenting with T.V. upstairs at Grand Central Station. In addition to our series, they did The Ford Theater and I Remember Mama from Grand Central. There were just two studios, and they managed to bring off all three shows."

 Excerpt from The Golden Age of Television by Max Wilk

[Worthington Miner, producer of Westinghouse Studio One] shudders at the memory. "There we were up in that tiny studio above Grand Central Station, and we had to do the damnedest technical things. In order to look as if we were on the deck of a submarine, we built a small door and shot through it with an 18 mm. lens. That made the deck look 165 feet long. Then we surrounded the set with tubs of water, with machinery to keep it making waves - a constant flow splashing over the bows, and all those actors working there on the deck. We almost had a disaster to begin with, because the water began seeping through the studio floor and almost flooded through it - which would have ruined that mural below in the main waiting room of Grand Central!"

Excerpt from The Decade That Shaped Television News by Sig Mickelson

Chester Burger of CBS tells the story of his experience filming the [1952 New Hampshire Primary] campaign with a cameraman, Larry Racies, in Peterborough in northeastern New Hampshire one late afternoon and evening in February. Since there was no available means of shipping their film to New York except a train from White River Junction, Vermont, more than three hours away by icy and snowy mountain roads, they determined that they had to put their package aboard that train. It was scheduled to leave at three o'clock the next morning. When they had finished filming less than four hours before the train's scheduled departure they rushed on icy mountain roads to assure the story would make the 7:30 PM program the next day. They sped into the station just as the conductor was giving the final signal for departure, ran to hand him the package, and relaxed with the knowledge that a courier would meet the train at Grand Central in the morning. They could be sure then that it would be on the 7:30 news that night, less than twenty-four hours after the event they had covered.

[wanswheel]

Excerpt from New York Architecture

From 1939 to 1964 CBS television occupied a large portion of the terminal building, particularly above the main waiting room. The space was used for four studios (41-44), network master control, film projection and recording, and facilities for local station WCBS-TV. In 1958, the first major videotape operations facility in the world opened in a former rehearsal room on the seventh floor of the main terminal building. The facility used fourteen Ampex VR-1000 videotape recorders. The CBS Evening News began its broadcasts there with Douglas Edwards. Many of the historic events during this period, such as John Glenn's Mercury Atlas 6 space mission, were broadcast from this location. Edward R. Murrow's "See It Now" originated from Grand Central, including his famous broadcasts on Senator Joseph McCarthy.

 

Excerpt from The Museum of Broadcast Communications

"This is an old team trying to learn a new trade," intoned Murrow to inaugurate See It Now on 18 November 1951. Murrow, as in all the programs that followed, was ensconced in Studio 41, exposing all the tricks of the electronic trade--the monitors, the microphones, the technicians all in view. To underscore this new technological undertaking, Murrow summoned up a split screen of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the first live coast-to-coast transmission.

[wanswheel]

Ginger Stanley, the underwater weather girl, at Grand Central Terminal in 1955.

http://www.filmfax.com/archives/pdf/ginger_stanley.pdf

Excerpt from The Origins of Television News in America by Mike Conway

Columbia found itself in a tough spot concerning television during the mid-1930s. The company did not have a television system to promote and it did not produce any television sets to sell. William Paley was not sure how television would fit in the media landscape, and some of his colleagues said he was not all that interested in the medium, especially as his radio empire grew. Even if he was not championing the potential of television, Paley certainly was not going to let his chief competitor have the glory to himself. So while CBS may not have had a team of engineers pushing the boundaries of the technology, Paley worked on ways to create the illusion that his company had the same level of commitment as RCA to television's future.

When RCA's David Sarnoff made news by promising an additional million-dollar investment in television, Paley told his crew to come up with a bigger and better transmitter for CBS. No matter that the company's W2XAB station had been off the air for years, Paley wanted bragging rights. Since NBC already had its transmitter on the tallest building in town, the Empire State Building, CBS settled for the second tallest, the Chrysler Building. Even though its transmitting equipment would be located almost three hundred feet lower than NBC's, Columbia explained that its location was better since the Chrysler building had an unobstructed view of midtown Manhattan and was farther north and thus had "the biggest market for television receivers."

Next Paley wanted a larger television studio than RCA, even though CBS did not have an operating television station at the time. Near the Chrysler Building, CBS engineers found their future studio, above the waiting area at the Grand Central Terminal. Before leasing the space engineers had to measure the area and compare it to RCA's studio. CBS soon boasted of having the largest television studio in the world. The press release proudly listed the dimensions as "225 feet in length, 60 feet in width, and 40 feet from floor to ceiling." Paley had now committed his company to buying and installing a new transmitter as well as to leasing and constructing a massive television studio - projects that would together cost close to a million dollars. At the same time, CBS did not even own a working television camera.

[DEDieckmann]

I saw that episode of the Office last week, and thought the same thing. There was no continuity between the two scenes at all. To me the setting was obviosly a museum, as there were one or two restored wooden passenger coaches on an adjacent track as he walked up to the very clean box car he climbed into.

[SALfan]

One episode of "Burn Notice" had a couple of scenes filmed at the Gold Coast (I think that's the name) RR museum in Miami, standing in for a railyard.  Pretty obvious that it wasn't a modern railyard, with the Florida East Coast covered wagon in red and yellow paint, and the Atlantic Coast Line passenger car.

[SALfan]

BaltACD

'In the Heat of the Night', if my memory is still any good, had its 'location' scenes filmed in and around Decatur, GA which is on CSX's Georgia Road between Augusta and Atlanta during the early 1990's when there was much equipment still running in their 'fallen flag' colors..

choochoobuff:

I have recently been watching old reruns of In the Heat of the Night on WGN. I never really watched it while it on the air during it's run. What I have noticed is the amount of railroad related items featured in the show. Of course, the first is the appearance of the Amtrak rolling past during the opening credits. I have also noticed a old diesel, possibly a road switcher, still wearing it's C&O paint scheme. Also, a scene in which a CSX and a SCL head up a consist. Evidently these are all pieces of the companies "adopted" by CSX. Does anyone else remember any shows in which actual railroads could be seen frequently?

 

I thought it was filmed in Social Circle, GA, but I could be wrong.  Pretty name for a town, anyway.

[ButchKnouse]

The first Flash Mob.

[Jack_S]

You're a Jean Sheperd fan?  Me too.  In the late 50s and early 60s I listened to his radio show on WOR out of NYC.  It reached most of the NE Atlantic coast and a good ways inland.  Guys I went to college and worked with in Philly were also fans and we had a good old time the next day talking about last night's show.  His sponsors were "The Village Voice" and Gogomobil (A German minicar).

I have at least two of his books and saw his PBS films, one of which was called "The Phantom of the Open Hearth".

Once, in NYC, he called on the air for a midnight gathering at Washington Square and several thousand showed up.  The NY Times covered it.  The police were not amused.

Jack

[AF53]

I'd have to agree with rixflix about "Petticoat Junction" and with ChuckCobleigh about "Wild Wild West". That show started and ended with trains.

Ray

[Andrew Falconer]

A few years ago I happened to see that the CBS show CSI:CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION had a few episodes with either railroad themes or entire acts of the show filmed at railroad locations.

Andrew

[Andrew Falconer]

The first episode of THE HUMAN TARGET on FOX took place on a high-speed train in California.

Andrew

[Andrew Falconer]

There was an episode of The OFFICE where Micheal Scott looks like he is going to jump on a train.

The first shot is him looking out the office building at a treeless, modern railyard filled with modern freight cars. Most of the rolling stock show in these shots were the Auto Carriers with galvanized panels.

When they get to the train they are at a railroad museum collection of rolling stock. There were a lot more trees at the railroad museum collection.  

To me it looked fairly obvious, especially the difference in trees and grass. I wonder what everybody else saw in that episode of The Office?

Andrew