This is, the way I see it, a VERY serious mistake by the filming crew of the movie. The Alaska Railroad, where the shooting of the movie took place, wanted all their logos and paint schemes of all the trains in the movie to be camouflaged. But yet, on the first shot of the locomotive of Eastbound 12 (yes, that is the shot of it before it mysteriously changes from ONE GP40 to TWO ALCo MRS's), you can see the blue and yellow paint scheme of the Alaska Railroad. On the DVD you might even be able to see the printed ALASKA on the side of the loco. See more...
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Continuity: After Manny's fingers get crunched between the cars, blood sprays on his face. In the next couple of scenes there is hardly any there. Also, when the prison warden get sprayed with the fire extinquisher he is cleaned up in the following shots.
Factual error: The train consists of four locomotives, but some close ups show wheels of freight cars.
Deliberate "mistake": When the front door of the old F-unit is refusing to open the guys put their shoulder to it. The door they are trying to bash outward actually swings into the area where they are standing. If they really wanted to go out that door they should have unlatched it and pulled.
Continuity: When the guard lets Buck in the gate to get on the elevator, he is holding the keys in his right hand. As Buck is giving the guard the shoes, the keys are in his left hand.
Continuity: Almost at the end of the movie, Warden Ranken is trying to board the plane hanging from a ladder of a helicopter, and Manny is yelling to him through the right windshield of the second locomotive, the old F7 streamliner. If you look closely when the camera shoots from the inside of the loco and forward through the windshield, you will see that the first engine is gone.
Factual error: When Buck and Manny fall down from the sewer exit into the water, they should be dead or seriously injured as the water is covered with large rocks and is shallow.
Deliberate "mistake": The entire plot wouldn't exist without this one, but just before the engineer stumbles out the door and falls off, he pulls the big red lever on the left side of the cab. In the real world this puts the air brake system into its emergency mode. Among other things, this mode trips a solenoid which causes the engine to return to idle, and the electrical system to not put out power. Neither the Diesel engine nor the electrical system will respond to control inputs until/unless the air system is reset.
Continuity: After the accident with the caboose, we see some inside shots of the first locomotive showing lots of debris from the caboose having penetrated the windshield. But in the outside shots, you can see that there are lots of debris on the front of it, but the windshield is intact.
Continuity: When you first see the freight train that eventually would get its caboose smashed, the locomotive is a big one with lots of snow on the front. In all the other shots of this train, it`s a smaller locomotive, and it has no snow on the front.
Continuity: Before and while the train crosses the bridge, the words "Alaska Railroad" at the top of the tunnel portal at the start of the bridge appear and disappear between shots.
Factual error: The connecting cables between the locomotives are obvious movie props. The real ones don't plug into each other - they plug into sockets on the locomotives because it is dangerous to have the connections hanging down where this film shows them.
Continuity: When Manny first sees the train they're going to board, they walk a short distance alongside the train as it's moving. Pay attention, and you will see that the second locomotive, the F7, is missing. The first locomotive is now coupled to the third locomotive, even though the F7 was there in the shot before and is back in the next shot.
Continuity: When Warden Ranken first goes to see Manny in his cell, he is walking down a prison corridor with prison cells on the left side of the camera and the prison wall on the other side. And when he is coming back from Manny's cell, he is coming down the same corridor. The problem is only that he is going the same direction as he was when he was going TO Manny's cell.
Continuity: Towards the end of the film, in the control room, as the guys are arguing about what to do, the man sitting at the computer terminal is wearing a sweater over his shirt and a black watch. The older man says something, then goes over to the terminal, but now the guy's sweater is off and his watch is in front of him on the desk.
Factual error: A locomotive on a single track finds itself on a collision course with an oncoming freight train. The dispatcher manages to contact the engineer of the freight train and to throw a switch diverting the freight onto a siding. All the freight train is accommodated on the siding by the time the locomotive arrives, so the locomotive clears the freight train, but it passes over the switch without being derailed, even though the switch has been set to favor the freight train - and the siding.
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