The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) on Netflix
British Railways plans to close the Titfield to Mallingford branch line. Vicar Sam Weech and squire Gordon Chesterford rally the villagers to buy the railway and run it themselves.
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Trailer
Plot summary
British Railways announces that the Titfield to Mallingford branch line will close. The residents of the village decide to take over the railway and run it themselves. Sam Weech, the vicar, and Gordon Chesterford, the squire, form a company and apply for a light railway order. Walter Valentine, a wealthy man, provides the money. The Ministry of Transport grants a month's trial, after which an inspection decides the line's future. Two bus operators, Alec Pearce and Vernon Crump, want a bus route instead and work against the plan.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The museum-piece Thunderbolt was played by Lion, a real Liverpool and Manchester Railway locomotive built in 1838 and 114 years old at the time of filming. Repainted red and green for Technicolor, it ran under its own power, and the tender damage it took when "rear-ended" is still visible beneath its buffer beam.
- Engine driver Ted Burbidge, fireman Frank Green and guard Harold Alford of the Westbury depot were British Railways employees, not actors, provided only to operate the locomotives on location. When Charles Crichton talked to them and decided they "looked and sounded the part", they were given speaking roles and credited.
- The film was inspired by the restoration of the narrow gauge Talyllyn Railway in Wales, the world's first heritage railway run by volunteers. Its name blends Titsey and Limpsfield, two Surrey villages near writer T. E. B. Clarke's home at Oxted.
- For the scene in which a replacement locomotive is "stolen", the production used a wooden mock-up locomotive mounted on a lorry chassis, with the rubber tyres just visible between the locomotive's driving wheels.
- The railway branch seen in the film had closed to all traffic on 15 February 1951 but was reopened for the shoot. Monkton Combe station stood in for Titfield, nearby Freshford for the village, and the disused Dunkerton Colliery also appears.
- Interviewed for an article in Railway World, writer T. E. B. Clarke said he based Mr. Valentine on an elderly gentleman he remembered in a hotel bar while on holiday.
