If you haven't yet watched the last episode of The Sopranos then read no further.
There were incidental, but quite depressing, Lionel casualties. A Sante Fe Warbonnet Diesel, and a Union Pacific Berkshire steamer.
Numerous Lionel accessories and a fair amount of FasTrack are also no longer with us.
Thankfully the boss, a vintage tinplate Blue Comet, was unharmed.
I knew the bad blood between MTH and Lionel was heating up, but I didn't think Mike was capable of this.
And here I am playing both sides. Yes, I admit it; I'm Biloco - Lionel, MTH, it doesn't matter to me. Whatever appeals to me at the moment. I just received six MTH C&O 60' passenger cars last Friday. They go so well with my MTH C&O Streamlined Hudson.
And now this. Blood on the tracks ain't just a Dylan album anymore.
Did you recognize the part of the shop they filmed, or had they altered it for the show?
I botched my description of the atrocity. I must have ran the DVR back four or five times and rewatched the scene. Yet I didn't notice until this morning, when my wife watched it, that the Blue Comet had been dropped. I guess it was too traumatic for my mind to absorb at first.
A Blue Comet is pretty much the only non-C&O/Chessie loco I want to get. Not the tinplate version, though it was still a sweet looking train.
As for scale, I've come to a tentative conclusion that it is nearly irrelevant. There are other things that make us all like model trains.
I guess I should have said I've bought stuff by mail from them for a long long time, I don't even know when it first was, those ads in the magazines have been running as long as I can remember. The show was in another episode of either The Sopranos, or some other NY/NJ based show, and from what I read on some forum, it was unchanged, from the outside anyway.
I saw the Blue Comet drop the first time. All part of "nice guy" Bobby's tragic death, all due to a missed call.
I don't know about your benchwork, but the last layout I had would have supported a dozen Bobby Baccalas falling on it. More dramatic if it collapsed, I suppose.
In general I liked the sequence.
I suppose you're right about scale not really mattering. I'm slowly building all the stuff to do a decent HO layout. I have a bunch of locos, mostly NYC, PC, and Conrail, and am looking at doing a kind of eastern later 60's to later 70' scenario, with a few new locos and stuff tossed in because I think they are neat looking, and in a couple of cases, were insanely cheap. I got some super cheap deal on new in the box Proto 2000 CR SD7's, and good old trainworld had a great deal on Alco FA-1's and 2's A and B powered pairs and I grabbed up several of those. I bought a whole bunch of older Athearn PRR and NYC locos that were custom painted and weathered on ebay and all of them run fine. I have about 250' of flex track and a couple dozen turnouts/switches waiting patiently for my $$$ to improve and for me to start on the benchwork.
You would be amazed at the amount of damage that can be done to things, without actually damaging them, if enough Hollywood magic is used.
I didn't see it, but for things like this in the past, movie sets have cast plaster duplicates of things they are going to break. Plaster breaks more reliably in a more spectacular fashion that plastic anyway, so the effect is better. Properly painted and only seen for a second or two at most during a movie or TV scene, no one knows the difference. DVD viewers might notice some white cores of stuff under the surface maybe, if they freeze-frame that particular frame.
The same goes for such stuff as benchwork (or tables or chairs) - if you want it to break in a spectacular fashion, you have to build it so it will break in a spectacular fashion. You can't always rely on the real thing to break the way you want it to. When a gun shot explodes someone's chest and shirt? Some makeup artist probably spent a day cutting the shirt in exactly the right places so it would do that. And it was probably the last of 30 shirts that had been modified in the same fashion only in slightly different places because the director didn't like the way the other 29 exploded in the various scene takes.
When the 4449 steam locomotive "derailed" back in the 1980s as a movie stunt? It was a highly detailed fiberglass mock-up of the right side view, which thanks to some selective camera angles and the fact you only see it in the movie for a few seconds prevents you from recognizing it as only about 20 inches deep.
I'm not saying they did or didn't break the real stuff. I'm just saying a lot of times, its easier and cheaper (for the desired effect) not to, and
*might* not have been done.
They also couldn't have been broken over and over and over for the various scene takes that would most certainly have been done. Once you have the mold to make the plaster duplicates of what you want to break, you can break as many as the director/producer/editor/etc. want before they like the final result.
How about Back to the Future? Have you seen the end where they send the old ten-wheeler into the ravine? I keep convincing myself that it isn't real. It has to be, I keep thinking I've seen the locomotive again. Perhaps it's been in other movies? By the way: Hi I'm new here!
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