This is one awesome video. Featuring cool cars and a LOAD of cool locomotives it is basically a driver’s ed film before such a thing really existed. There’s an old timer who was a train engineer and he spends the majority of the video telling his youthful (we hope) grandson about what makes a good locomotive engineer. Those lessons are folded into safe driving practices. The 1935 Chevrolet film Safe Roads is a fun watch because the world was still a few years away from the horrors of WWII and steam engines were basically at their technological peak and were still the most commonly used form of locomotive in the world. The diesel revolution was still years off.
While the whole thing is kind of campy we love the scenes showing the trains accelerating from a stop, lumbering around hills, and launching both ash and cinders into the sky as they work at full bore. Many of you will likely be able to identify who made many of these engines as we have a strong number of train enthusiasts that follow BangShift. We’re not in that league at all so if you see cool junk that you want to educate us on, tell us in the comments. We want to learn!
So do locomotive engineers and kid drivers really have anything in common? Watch this and you tell us!
The “actors” cover all the emotions from A to B. I say “actors” because I’m guessing these were not classically trained – or trained at all. The loco shots were interesting, though. I wonder where they got all those good-looking classic cars?
Dan
Lionel Standard Gauge trains are the ones used in the \”head on\” demonstration at the beginning. Note all the fine Lionel Accessories on their layout. Wow!