Viaduct scene in "Around the World in Eighty Days"

[whole diary]

[Marlburian]

Anyone else viewing this TV^▸ (Thames Valley, or TeleVision, depending on context) version? I think that the railway scene may have been filmed in Romania. It features a vintage train trundling along a single track with vegetation growing between the sleepers. It comes to a damaged viaduct, with no support under one section of track. Understandably the crew don't want to proceed, but Phileas Fogg (hitherto depicted as a wimp) decides it can be done, to get an injured child to hospital.

First the coal has to be removed from the tender to lighten the load, then, once across, the one carriage is stripped of all its wood for fuel. (In the book this happened to the small ship crossing the Atlantic.) I hope that the carriage was a modern mock-up, not a vintage vehicle!

The plot itself wasn't at all convincing, but the filming was, even allowing for CGI^▸ (Computer-Generated Imagery). Presumably it was filmed on a semi-derelict line and the viaduct did look as if it were genuinely damaged.

Any thoughts on the locomotive used and on the filming?

(There was a similar scene in North West Frontier where, IIRC^▸ ('if I recall/remember/read correctly'), the loco's weight cause the rails to sag. This after the doughty escapees, led by Kenneth More, had previously unbolted a section of rail from behind their train to replace one that was missing in front of it.)

[Red Squirrel]

It’s a small point, given the ludicrousness every other detail of the plot, but I can’t help thinking that most of the sleepers would have stayed attached to the rails. This could allow you to suspend your critical faculties for a few minutes and almost believe that a train could have crossed the gap (though how far it would have got with no water on the boiler is another matter). But no! All the sleepers were gone, leaving two unsupported rails between which even the lightest of rail vehicles would obviously drop.

All rather silly.