How about a thread on trains in Hollywood feature films? Not only movies about train subjects like "Danger Lights" or "Broadway Limited" but films where trains have made a brief, incidental appearance on the screen.
I tend to enjoy old B&W movies on TCM way more than anything they put out today, but that's just me. You couldn't drag me out to a movie theater.
Right now I'm watching a film called "Off the Record" from 1939 with Pat O'Brien and Joan Blondell. There was a beautiful exterior shot of Grand Central which cut to a phony interior. In the background you hear a train announcement with stops in "Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago", then it cuts to a shot of a Southern Pacific 4-4-2 Atlantic pulling a 4 car train.
There was also a very brief shot of the liner Normandie, which in the following shot morphed into the Queen Elizabeth.
Lastly there is a train wreck, shown with an obvious scale model of an SP train derailing. Then the actors, playing news reporters" are seen walking about the full scale mockup of the wreckage.
Don't care how off the details are, as long as I get an eye full of a young Joan Blondell.
They don't build 'em like that any more.
