Tag Archives: Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal

Disaster On The Coastliner 1979

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ABC Television / Orion Pictures

MERRY CHRISTMAS 2024!

This is a LONG, but enjoyable review — at least it was for me! ;p

I previously wrote about this ABC Sunday Night Movie ten years ago. My summary of the All-Star Cast, pretty much covers the basics about what happened. Whoever wrote the script for this 97 minute potboiler, obviously had no idea how a railroad operates. The shortcoming of my first review is I only included two pictures!

That just won’t do when you have early-Amtrak equipment on both coasts (ex-Santa Fe Surf Line in California and ex-New Haven Shore Line in Connecticut) with lots of footage inside Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (LAUPT) as well. Thus, this review will be short on plot and long on pictures.

Oh, did I mention? William Shatner has lots of screen time despite being only 7th in the credits (an unforgiveable oversight) and is the hero of the day — as only Captain Kirk could do it. Engines ahead. Warp factor one.

I’m really torn about the ID of this locomotive in the opening credits. It’s too blurry to get the exact unit number (400 something). At first I thought it was an EMD FL9 locomotive, but AFAIK, those engines didn’t have nose lift rings. So this is probably an EMD E9 diesel selected from a private railroad, pre-Amtrak.

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Santa Fe 3759 — 2004

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Pentrex – Santa Fe 3759 – Video DVD
Seymour F. Johnson Enterprises – Farewell to Steam! – Audio LP

This is the story of the final run of Santa Fe Railway steam locomotive #3759 in 1955. A 4-8-4 Northern built by Baldwin in 1928, this oil-burning behemoth was saved from the scrapper’s torch and placed on display in Kingman, Arizona where it resides today.

Today’s movie review was inspired by an LP from my father’s record collection — which I literally wore out playing, as a youngster. Loved that record. It wasn’t until later in life that I discovered a great deal of color film footage had been taken of the fan trip and put out on DVD by Pentrex. I had to get a copy.

The harder part was getting a good audio CD to replace the original LP. Apparently, there are two versions out there. The first was the original 1955 sounds put out by Mr. Johnson (see above). The second, more common, was a 1958 remixed album which had the reverb turned up to 11. Awful recording. As someone said, “It sounds like the listener was at the bottom of a steel drum”.

Anyways, Trolley Dodger to the rescue! Offered for sale on his website (see link at the bottom of this review) is an audio CD of the ORIGINAL mono non-reverbed LP. Fantastic sound quality and frequently playing as I drive along in my truck. ;p

For this video review, I created over 200 screen captures, but I’ll try to whittle that down to 65 or less, as #3759 makes it way from Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal (LAUPT) to Barstow and back. Let’s watch big steam in action over Cajon Pass! In color!

Climbing towards Summit, the Farewell to Steam special passes a beautiful set of A-B-B-A F units on a downhill freight. With the San Gabriel mountains in the background, AT&SF #3759 blasts through a cut during a photo runby.

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Murder is my Beat 1955

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Allied Artists Productions

I first heard about this B noir picture from reader Tony Wilson. As I researched, I discovered a good copy on both archive.org and YouTube. The film features at least 3 different Southern Pacific Railroad steam locomotives pulling various heavyweight and streamlined passenger equipment.

It’s a relatively short flick at just 77 minutes, but there are two train sequences at the 31 minute and 70 minute marks packed full of onboard and train exterior goodness. I had a great time discovering the equipment used — made harder by B&W night-time footage. And there might just be a little cheesecake in there for our more mature readers.

Let’s go ride “The Friendly” Southern Pacific!

Churning, spoked drivers roll along an impeccably-groomed roadbed…which segues into this shot of a steamer pulling a 5 car passenger train down a weed-choked right-of-way.

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