Rocky Mountain Railroad on Discovery Channel

[dbdb]

I stumbled across 8 episodes on-line, I think it's the full season that will start airing on the Discovery Channel.  It follows various train and maintenance of way crews on the CP around Revelstoke and the ONR.  The version I found had a British narrator, I don't know if that's the same narration it will have on Discovery.  It seems like it was filmed in the late winter through early summer last year.

Rocky Mountain Railroad at discovery.ca

It's not bad for a "reality" program, standard reality show problem where the most routine, trivial things are made out to be a major crisis some of the narration details are just plain wrong like the F in F unit stands for fourteen hundred horsepower.  The British narrator is annoying, hopefully the have a better narrator when it airs for real. It also perhaps paints the CP as a bit too happy in the shadow of the Hunter Harrison era.  Too much "if I make a tiny screw up I'll be fired in spite of x years of perfect service but that's a-ok".

[smallspy]

15 hours ago, dbdb said:

....some of the narration details are just plain wrong like the F in F unit stands for fourteen hundred horsepower.

That's not wrong in the least.

 

Dan

[Doppelkupplung]

Reminds of "Mighty Trains", a show they did last year too. Was pretty neat; they did VIA, Shinkansen, Norwegian Rail Express and some other stuff. Pretty cool, because they did indeed get some behind the scenes action. So much so, that in Japan, they had to blur out some stuff at the maintenance facilities. 

[dbdb]

2 hours ago, smallspy said:

That's not wrong in the least.

 

Dan

Ah, after some googling, you're right.  My bad for not researching better.  I was right that there was never a 1400hp model.  Instead I'll accuse GM/EMD's marketeers of misleading advertising by rounding up 50hp on the original F units.

[smallspy]

18 hours ago, dbdb said:

Ah, after some googling, you're right.  My bad for not researching better.  I was right that there was never a 1400hp model.  Instead I'll accuse GM/EMD's marketeers of misleading advertising by rounding up 50hp on the original F units.

GM has never been one to not let the marketing wank take over a good idea. Take the evolution of the GP series - the introduction of the next in the progression from the GP20 was the GP22, and to the point where the first one outshopped was called that. But at that same time, GE was coming out with their Universal line of locomotives, the first of which was called the U25. GM felt that "more was betterer!!1!", and changed the name of that next locomotive to the GP30.

 

Dan

[GM5000]

They also came up with a list of "30 Major Improvements" for the 30 line, which headlined their marketing materials (thus rationalizing the jump from 20/22 to 30...).  Ah, marketing....

 

I hope it is an improvement over Railroad Alaska, which was un-watchable IMHO.  The last straw was the scene where "the workers need to get the track cleared or the freight train speeding towards them could face a major disaster!!!!!!!!".  Yeah, if the crew falls asleep of the dispatcher completely screws up, maybe.  <CLICK>.

[dbdb]

The ONR segments follow the similar formula to Railroad Alaska.  The CP segments have some of that disaster stuff but not quite as bad and in many cases the consequence is "it will cost money because a ship will be delayed", I don't think they could afford any more creativity from the writers.  The characters are a little more believable, they're still kind of caricatures but somewhat grounded in reality and not as farcical as Railroad Alaska.

It's very white-bread in the CP segments but the ONR segments do feature a few FN in Moosonee and Moose Factory.   What I found most infuriating about Railroad Alaska was it was all white-bread except for two black characters that were pretty much playing the caricatures a house slave and a field slave.  I don't know if it represents reality but it seemed like there were more women featured than I would have expected for the industry.

[Tom1122]

My biggest beef with "Railroad Alaska" was that half the show wasn't about trains, but people living off the grid. They should have made that  a completely different show.

[dbdb]

Ask and ye shall receive ... https://www.diynetwork.com/shows/alaska-off-the-grid and a few others.