1 December 2014
Landslides in the Movies Part 2: The Railway Children (1970)
Posted by Dave Petley
The Railway Children – Landslides in the Movies Part 2
This is Part 2 in my new series on Landslides in the Movies. Part 1 is here. The 1970 movie The Railway Children, which was based on a novel of the same name by Edith Nesbit, stars a very young Jenny Agutter. Probably the most famous scene in this film occurs when a landslide blocks the railway line at a time when a train is approaching. The three children run up the line to flag down the approaching train, thus preventing a disaster. This scenario is far from impossible – indeed I have featured landslide-induced derailings of trains on many occasions on this blog, and some of them do indeed have catastrophic consequences.
The landslide scene in the film is shown in this sequence on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn4jeFRLv_U
If nothing else it makes you realise how far special effects have come in the last 45 years. The movement starts as a translational slide – note how the trees remain perfectly upright as they displace – although the movement of the trees whilst the grass around them remains static is quite amusing in some ways. A really nice element is that the landslide occurs on a cut slope that clearly has an inadequate retaining structure at the toe – it looks like poor engineering by the construction crew to me. The should never have expected to retain a slope of this size with old railway sleepers. In addition, the way that the wooden posts topple onto the line suggests that they had very shallow foundations – surely a recipe for disaster:
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It is this poor engineering that probably accounts for the collapse on a beautiful sunny day and in a dry condition (note the dust that is kicked up by the collapse at various points). The boulders on the line at this point is a nice touch, suggesting some precursory deformation.. Of course the sequencing of the failure is a little odd, in that the upslope section moves before there is much deformation in the retaining structure – there is clearly a complex process at work here.
The post-failure landslide
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I’m not sure that the film crew managed to depict the post-failure landslide scar particularly well – the deformation at the start suggests that the scar should extend right up the slope.
Finally, I think that the children need to study natural hazards at school, given that they diagnose the event as an earthquake.
Dave Petley is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom. His blog provides commentary and analysis of landslide events occurring worldwide, including the landslides themselves, latest research, and conferences and meetings.
hi i worked on the special effects for the land slide .. i even made the old oak tree that fell over.. you are picking holes in the scene without investigating why it was all done the way it was..and the engineering that went into making the tree fall over was pretty good stuff at the time..
[I think you are taking this far too seriously. In fact I am not picking holes, and am pretty complimentary about the sequence. D]
One of my favourite special effects from a film. Congratulations on your work, and so much better than the remake too.
Terrified me as a little kid. The dead tree reminded me of the one in the credits of Follyfoot.
The effect of the trees sliding down the hillside was thanks to a very complicated set up, a company in Keighley who built escalators for department stores airports and railway stations all over the world installed 3 redundant escalator units buried in trenches hidden out of view but very effective for the special effects technology at that time the rusting installations where removed and scrapped but you can still see quite clearly to this day the trenches which seemed to have been filled with ballast of some sort, I’m 70 years of age and have watched this wonderful film many many times and it still charms me immensely but always makes me cry like a 5 year old child and not just at the end when Roberta is reunited with her daddy but also the part when Perks brings the girls some old magazines and she sees the newspaper article about her father’s arrest.