24.12.07

St Trinian's locos

Watching The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery (1966) on TV the other day it made me wonder how many films contain footage of steam locos and whether these have been documented on the web. For the record, the loco Frankie Howard's robbers were driving was LNER 0-6-0T J50/3 class 68961, introduced 1926, and the one the girls pursued in was a J94 'bucket' saddle tank 68011. The J50s are absent from my 1964 Ian Allen combined volume, so I assume they must have been scrapped by then and the film made with one of the very last as none were preserved. It was too dark to catch the loco being robbed right at the start of the film. Although these are LNER locos, the location was Longmoor military railway, Longmoor Military Camp, Hampshire, also the location for The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Challenge (1960), and Runaway Railway (1965). The new St Trinian's film has had awful reviews, but from the trailers, head girl Gemma Arterton looks utterly gorgeous.

1 comment:

Nick said...

I nodded off before seeing the end of the train sequence in A Hard Day's Night on tv the other evening. Some monochrome stills from the film on the link below..

http://www.wsr.org.uk/beatles.htm

In March 1964 - more than forty years ago - the relatively peaceful surroundings of Minehead railway station were shattered by the screams of hundreds of schoolchildren. Teachers at local schools gave in to demands for time off from the classroom and a large crowd of excited teenagers gathered by the railway tracks. And the reason for all this excitement? The Beatles were in town shooting scenes for their first movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and no one was going to miss the chance to see their heroes!

On the morning of the 2nd March 1964 a special charter train of 5 coaches trundled out of London’s Paddington station heading for Minehead. On board were a motley crew of film technicians under the command of director Dick Lester, some well known actors like Wilfred Brambell (Steptoe), John Junkin, Norman Rossington and Richard Vernon and four lads from Liverpool – John, Paul, George and Ringo....