Help with Your Film or Story
I can help you:
- Identify and use the correct items, locales, characters, and
language in your film or story,
OR - Adjust your story so it's historically, technically, and geographically correct, increasing its interest and authenticity
Help you get the following right:
- Railroads: mainline, shortline, logging, mining, switching, terminal, industrial, commuter, light rail
- Locales and geologies: urban, rural, mountain, forest, desert
- Locomotives: steam (rod & geared), heavy electric, diesel
- Cars: passenger (dozens of kinds), freight cars, cabooses, maintenance-of-way, track equipment, wrecking cranes, etc.
- City: interurbans, streetcars, steam dummies, horse- and donkey-cars, modern light rail
- Structures: depots, roundhouses, bridges and tunnels, rip tracks, ash pits, interlocking towers, junctions, crossings, freighthouses, ice tracks, stock pens, beaneries, flophouses
- Employees: engineers, conductors, trainmen, switchmen, dispatchers, telegraphers, clerks, car dept, mechanical dept (locomotives), dining car stewards, sleeping car porters, trainmasters, superintendents. People, uniforms, tools, work procedures.
- Labor: unions, rules, practices - and how people worked with and around them
- Language: terminology, slang
- Signals: old "high balls", color light (many different kinds), semaphores (upper and lower quadrant + train order), smashboards, etc. Displayed on a staff, bridge, cantilever, below a bridge, dwarf, in cab. Signal aspects (single or multiple lights) and indications (what the signal means, like "clear" or "stop" or "advance approach medium").
- Safety: flagging, fusees, torpedoes, rules, blueflagging, red and yellow-red trackside flags.
- Track: single track, double track, multiple mains, crossings, crossovers, switches, double-slip switches. Bumpers at the end of track. Guard rails. Wooden and concrete ties. Date nails. Different kinds and weights of rail.
Location & Equipment Scouting
I can help you find locations and equipment that are correct for the area and timeframe(s) your film or story is set in. Can help you work with the owners of museums, operating railroads (class 1 down through small single-engine shortlines), and private equipment to get the use of the equipment and track you need.
Why Use Trains in your Film or Story?
People love trains! They love the romance of railroading, the history
and action, sights and sounds. The whole railroading mystique is archetypal.
Railroads were a big part of the fabric of American life from the 1850s
through the 1970s and beyond.
About Paul Bingman
Paul has worked as a train dispatcher, station agent, interlocking and CTC operator, telegrapher, wire chief, train order operator, and more. He has spent a lot of time in the company of train & engine crews, signal maintainers, track workers, clerks, car knockers, management, and other people.
Contact me: info at railroad movie consultant dot com