Silver Streak : Love this movie…Amtrak today?????

Absolutely loved this movie since I was a kid..but my wife and I were having a fun-filled discussion on current train travel.

First things first, the cost. Go to amtrak. com and get rates on a first class ticket from L.A. to Chicago. Then get another set of first class tickets from Kansas City to Chicago.

Second, check out the total travel time. In the movie it's about 3 days. That would be a bona fide MIRACLE with Amtrak today.

Third, the meals on the train. My wife and I have read countless stories about the HORROR of Amtrak food, and some stories about how they have RUN OUT OF FOOD. This ties into

Fourth, probably the most recognized goof on the main page and the most hilariousgiving a civilian a gun AND shells! I LOL every time Donaldson says, "Caldwellyour shells!". I am sorry I love this film but for some reason I laugh EVERY time because I know how ridiculous that is. Of course, when you watch movies you are supposed to let go of some reality.

Anyhoo, I won't post the figures from our research above, I thought I'd let everyone who's a fan of this film be amused by the findings. Granted it is sad that train travel in Europe is thousands of years ahead of what we have here in the US

Oh and one more thing, the FUNNIEST line in the movie, IMHO:

"you can start with who shot Rembrandt!" again, LOL EVERY time.

kfmg

Go ride the "Canadian" from Vancouver to Toronto is uses the same exact cars as in Silver Streak, execpt that have a new paint scheme

Will we ever get the Wonder Years on DVD!!

kevfannc: The Silver Streak depicts a Los Angeles-to-Chicago train schedule that's roughly the same as the one followed by Amtrak in the 1970's, which in turn is roughly the same as the one followed by them today. The current Los Angeles-to-Chicago trip time on Amtrak's Southwest Chief is 46 hours and 35 minutes, or slightly under two days. The train leaves Los Angeles at 6:45 p.m. Pacific Time, and arrives in Chicago at 3:20 p.m. Central Time slightly under two days later. Screenwriters, journalists, and others often state that it takes "three days" to go by passenger train between the West Coast and Chicago, a very misleading statement whose only justification (if it can even be called a justification) is that the trip is customarily spread across three calendar days, with the first and third being only partial days. Such a statement is like getting in your car at 11:58 p.m. to drive to the convenience store to get a carton of milk, arriving there at 12:02 a.m., and then saying "It took me two days to drive to the convenience store". Filmgoers, newspaper readers, and others who aren't familiar with current-day American passenger train travel typically assume that the so-called "three days" means approximately 72 hours, as you obviously did.

The notion that "Amtrak is always running out of food" is something of a minor popular myth. I've ridden Amtrak hundreds of times over three decades and have never gone hungry. For the most part, the myth appears to have its origin in (1) rare but highly publicized instances of extreme, usually weather-related delays that cause food to run low, in most of which cases emergency food supplies are provided to the train with reasonable promptness; and (2) cases where a cafe car or a dining car runs out of one or even a few itemswhether because of unexpected demand, inept food-stocking by Amtrak, or other reasonsand oversensitive passengers go ballistic and report in a blog or wherever that "we were going to starve!". Incidents of these two types are rarely of any great significance, but they are consonant with people's paranoia about Amtrak and about going hungry, and so they get lots of publicity and are incorrectly taken to be common.

dishtv: It's impossible that the cars making up VIA Rail Canada's current-day Canadian train are the "exact same ones" used in the movie The Silver Streak, although for all I know one or a few may be the same. (There are websites and printed sources where the exact identities of all these cars can be checked.) First of all, running the Canadian requires several trainsets, most of which are simultaneously in use at any given time, whereas obviously filming The Silver Streak required only one trainset; so even in the highly unlikely event that all the cars from the movie happened to be in use on the Canadian in 2008-2009, that train would also have to be using many other cars, and would most likely be reshuffling them all among its various trainsets on a regular basis. Also, over the period from the mid seventies to today, VIA Rail Canada has owned hundreds of overnight-type passenger railcars (sleepers, coaches, diners, lounges, and others) that, like the ones used in The Silver Streak, date from the forties and fifties, and has disposed of them in various ways when they've no longer been needed: they would have had no reason to keep a certain group of them in use, let alone all in use on one particular train, just because those cars happened to have once been used in a movie.

Perhaps you should have said that the Canadian uses "the same type of cars" as the movie The Silver Streak did.

The only real down-side to reconstructing the movie itinerary like this is that the Amtrak trains don't come into (what is now) the Ogilvie Transportation Center, the movie's scene of the crash; they come into Union Station instead, which is just two blocks down and one block over. Amtrak trains from the north and west come in on a final approach from Chicago's west side, then curve south alongside the Chicago River for a couple of blocks before reaching the underground tracks of Union Station. In fact, the final curve around to the southbound approach actually takes them under an overpass on which the Silver Streak would have had to travel in order to come into "Central Station" in the movie.

The Silver Streak's filmed approach is a hodgepodge of scenic shots that start on the south side, but it actually comes in to Northwestern Station on what was then the Chicago and North Western commuter lines (now run by Metra). The final approach shot makes a long sweeping move to the right through the switching yard, going into the trainshed on Track 2. (What was originally Track 1 had, at that time, been replaced by an odd, yellow-colored enclosed walkway called the "Northwest Passage," which is visible on the right in the movie's approach shot. It allowed commuters to walk from the terminal to the nearby Lake Street line of the El (the Chicago Transit Authority elevated trains.).

Both the old Northwestern Terminal and the old trainsheds have been replaced now, but the layout and tracks are the same, and in fact I've been having some major retro fun recently, because for the past week or so, my daily morning train has coming into that station on yes, Track 2. When you're watching the final approach to the terminal from the lead car, it is a _lot_ like the shot in the movie. Great fun, as long as we stop at the end. :-)