A Railway Collision
About A Railway Collision
A slow train on a single track through model mountains stops and starts to reverse. An express comes out of a tunnel on the same line, hits it, and both trains fall down the embankment. The wreck is a toy layout in a field at Robert W. Paul's studio.
Cast & crew
More about A Railway Collision
Walter R. Booth directed and Robert W. Paul produced it at Paul's Animatograph Works in Muswell Hill. Frederick A. Talbot, writing in 1912, says the scenery was built in a field, with a long run of model track and toy trains. The film is 40 feet, about forty seconds, made for a Kinetoscope peephole and then, because of demand, put on a cinematograph. It was also sold as A Railroad Wreck. American pirates copied it.
Themes
Making
The mountain, lake, yacht, and tunnel were scenery in a field. The trains were toys.
Reviews
Frederick A. Talbot in 1912 called the forty seconds a complete wreck in miniature, and said the soft film image helped the toys pass for full-sized engines.
Audiences
The short was a commercial hit and was widely pirated in the United States.
Look
Booth films the model continuously, without a cut to a full-scale carriage.
Technique
A disaster staged with toy trains and built scenery, later a standard method in British trick films.
Preservation
It is one of the few Robert W. Paul films that survive.
Notes
- Talbot says viewers thought Paul had been first on the scene of a real crash.
- Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline calls it one of the earliest uses of models for a large disaster, and notes that Booth does not cut in full-scale passengers.
- Later British films copied the model-train method.
Scenes
- The express leaves the tunnel as the other train reverses into it.
- Both engines tumble off the embankment.
