One way in which the movie and real life agree is the hazardous material carried in some of the runaway’s cars. Then a CSX trainmaster, Jon Hosfeld, was able to run alongside at a road crossing just south of Kenton, pull himself aboard Engine 8888, and stop it.
The real-life chase crew caught up to the runaway several miles before it reached Kenton, coupled onto its rear car, and braked it enough to get through sharp curves in town without derailing. Had one or more locomotives coupled onto the real runaway’s front engine, or even just been pushed by it, anyone aboard the “rescue” engine could have just walked to the unoccupied ones and shut them down - no copters or fireballs required. That isn’t exactly true, as the dead-man feature should also activate the locomotives’ own brakes, but for simplicity’s sake one could assume the movie engineer also applied the locomotive brakes.Īmong the movie’s first attempts to stop the runaway is the dispatch of another train’s locomotives to pull out ahead of it, let it catch up, and then brake enough to allow a combat-veteran railroad employee dangling from a helicopter to drop aboard the unoccupied train.īut a sudden jolt sends the veteran crashing through a windshield, ending that effort, and an aborted attempt to derail the runaway at this point succeeds only at sending the slow-down engines careening off the track and wrecking in a huge, unrealistic fireball.Īlthough CSX may have considered sending engines out ahead of the real runaway as a last resort, this part of the movie is pure fiction. Movie dialogue soon brings up the “dead-man” feature, and a trainmaster played by Rosario Dawson explains that because the train’s air brakes are not connected, it wouldn’t work.
In the movie, the engineer also steps down from the locomotive to change a track switch, and while he’s doing that, a control lever somehow moves by itself to apply full throttle power - one of many elements likely to irk railroad-savvy viewers, although only a few materially affect the story line. Thankfully, in real life, no one was injured in the incident. It was not going as fast as the movie-heroic rescue on screen, but it was plenty real-life-heroic for all who were involved. And a very brave railroad engineer did jump on the moving train to go inside the cab and hit the brake. According to the official report on the C SX runaway train incident, as in the movie, the engineer got out of the cab to adjust a switch and was not able to get back on the train because it accelerated. (The movie is set in Pennsylvania.) A runaway SD-40-2 locomotive with 22 loaded and 25 empty cars amounting to a total of 2898 gross trailing tons ran for 66 miles carrying cargo that included molten phenol acid, a highly flammable and toxic substance. While the characters and their situations and relationships are fictional, some of the most unbelievable moments in the movie are those that really did happen.
But in the case of next week’s “Unstoppable,” the runaway train movie starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine, the real story is uncomfortably close to the heart-thumping adrenaline rush we see in the movie. When it says “Inspired by true facts” at the beginning of a movie, we are warned that there may be little relationship between what we see on screen and what really happened.