{"id":13453,"date":"2014-12-01T23:50:10","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T23:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=13453"},"modified":"2014-12-04T02:00:46","modified_gmt":"2014-12-04T02:00:46","slug":"railway-children-1970","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2014\/12\/01\/railway-children-1970\/","title":{"rendered":"Landslides in the Movies Part 2: The Railway Children (1970)"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Railway Children – Landslides in the Movies Part 2<\/h5>\n

This is Part 2 in my new series on Landslides in the Movies.\u00a0 Part 1 is here<\/a>.\u00a0 The 1970 movie<\/a> The Railway Children<\/em>, which was based on a novel of the same name<\/a> by Edith Nesbit, stars a very young Jenny Agutter<\/a>.\u00a0 Probably the most famous scene in this film occurs when a landslide blocks the railway line at a time when a train is approaching.\u00a0 The three children run up the line to flag down the approaching train, thus preventing a disaster.\u00a0 This scenario is far from impossible – indeed I have featured landslide-induced derailings of trains<\/a> on many occasions on this blog<\/a>, and some of them do indeed have catastrophic consequences<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The landslide scene in the film is shown in this sequence on Youtube<\/a>:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Vn4jeFRLv_U<\/p>\n

If nothing else it makes you realise how far special effects have come in the last 45 years.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The should never have expected to retain a slope of this size with old railway sleepers.\u00a0 In addition, the way that the wooden posts topple onto the line suggests that they had very shallow foundations – surely a recipe for disaster:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 The boulders on the line at this point is a nice touch, suggesting some precursory deformation..\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The post-failure landslide<\/p><\/div>\n

.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Finally, I think that the children need to study natural hazards at school, given that they diagnose the event as an earthquake.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1970 movie The Railway Children featured a translational landslide that blocked a railway track. Fortunately three children were on hand to save the day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":13454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[584],"tags":[817,469,185,809,80,6,816],"class_list":["post-13453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-2","tag-cut-slope-failure","tag-featured","tag-landslide","tag-movie-2","tag-railway","tag-train","tag-translational-landslide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}