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I remember watching Atomic Train on TV. Undeniably, the single worst train movie of all time. Period. When I was watching it, there was some guy who was "hosting" the movie and made brief appearances before and after commercial breaks. In one of these appearances, he said that in the past, Rob Lowe had written a screenplay about railroads and that as a result, knew more about trains than anyone else working on the movie. Considering how it turned out, that knowledge must have been extremely limited. A six-year-old that's into Thomas The Tank Engine probably knows more about trains than whoever wrote the script for this stinker. There is one scene from that movie that sticks in my mind. In it, some big general and other guys grom the Pentagon are going to see the dispatcher to discuss the situation. The dispatcher is sitting at the CTC board when the general and guys come in. The dialogue goes like this: Dispatcher: Know anything about trains, general? General: (Trying really hard to do a Jack Nicholson "You can't handle the truth" voice.) They run on tracks, don't they? Dispatcher: (Pauses. Then looks away, speaking slowly with fear.) On good days... [quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by gabe I think there was also a Hogans Heroes episode to that effect, but I am barely old enough to remember it. Bottom line, it is no more cool to blow up a bridge with a train with a crew on it than it is to blow up a bridge with cars and drivers on it. [/quote] As a big fan of Hogan's Heroes, I'd like to just set the record straight about some things. There are numerous episodes of the show that involve the heroes blowing up trains (they also blew up many factories, etc.). The messge here is not that it's really cool to blow stuff up for fun. They're fighting a war and there are reasons for doing this. In war, there are many casualties. It's not pretty, but it's a fact of life. Sure, it is very sad that the train crew was probably killed. But, you also have to think of the fact that the train was carrying vital supplies and ammunition for the German war effort that, if delivered, certainly wouldn't have been very good for the Allies and would have probably led to many thousands of deaths. The importance of railroads on both sides during WWII cannot be overestimated. On bombing missions, railway yards were always high-priority targets. People involved in the Resitance Movement performed many tasks simmilar to those on Hogan's Heroes and certainly blew up many trains. These people risked their own lives doing this and in doing so helped win the war. But, I also have to say that Hogan's Heroes was definitely not very accurate when it came to showing trains. I can think of only one episode where a German train is actually shown. A couple of times, a Lima Berkshire was shown (at night). The most common train footage used was of a train (also at night) that I think might be Australian (hard to tell), but certainly wasn't German, anyway. The worst was one episode where they used footage of an SP GS-4 in broad daylight! Whenever a train was blown up, they used the same footge of what is definetly a North American train getting blown to bits.
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