Tag Archives: lower quadrant semaphore

The West~Bound Limited 1923

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Film Booking Offices of America (FBO)

“An Amazing Photodrama of Flesh and Steel” is the tempting come-on of one lobby card (seen above). Today’s feature from the silent era was filmed in the Los Angeles area at both Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroad locations.

My review pretty much just skips over the plot and concentrates on the train and locomotive goodness. Considering the movie is 100 years old, it’s a reasonably crisp print. A link to this movie can be found at the end of my narrative. Enjoy!

Southern Pacific Lines #2420 gets a fair amount of screen time and is seen here at full gallop. The 4-6-2 is from Espee’s P-1 Class and was built by Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1906. This was robust, speedy passenger power for its day including 77″ drivers, 200psi boiler pressure and just under 30,000lbs of tractive effort.

Sister locomotive #2423 is shown here for comparison, in this well-lit view from 1940.

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Play Safe 1936

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Paramount Pictures

Hey, how about a Max Fleischer Color Classic (Cartoon) to start things off for March…filmed in Technicolor, no less?! I found a copy on YouTube (see below) in remarkably good condition to review.

It’s basically a railroad safety film for kiddies back in the day with everyone from the narrator to anthropomorphic model trains to the gauges in the locomotive cab yelling at the boy to, “PLAY SAFE”… mostly to no avail.

In a bit of serendipity, I found this cartoon short whilst looking for the movie Play Safe 1927 (starring Monty Banks) as suggested by John Davies. I couldn’t find a decent version of that 1927 flick online, but found a great copy of what I review here. Enjoy.

Our short feature opens as a little boy (we’ll call him “Phil”), is reading in the backyard whilst straddling his electric train set, as his faithful dog (we’ll call him “Boots”) sleeps nearby. “The Ballad of Casey Jones” is playing in the background.

Phil’s house is right next to a double track main line featuring lower quadrant semaphores. The details in this frame alone are outstanding — fenced yard, back porch, train set complete with tunnel and water tower. How about that magnificent tree behind Boots?

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