Re: 1988's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Here is one of the “chase vehicles”. Looks can be deceiving and in the case of movie making, they most likely are. The two chase vehicles were Hollywood creations with Ford 2.3L 4-cylinder engines and automatic transmissions – running gear out of an old Pinto…. You couldn’t expect an actor to actually know how to operate a Model T, on a dirt road, next to a train running 15 mph, could you? We are sitting out by the Highway Department Yard a half mile out of Antonito. It was discovered that the paved county road that parallels the RR out of town was in the shot, and THAT would not do. Several dump trucks of dirt later, it was covered. Better, but still not right. Lets send a bunch of folks out into the desert and grab all the sagebrush they can carry, we'll throw that around and make the road disappear. So they did...



The third day was mostly spent on spot out at MP 286 beyond Furgeson’s Trestle, while second unit shot Phraudomobiles bouncing through the boonies chasing some studio stunt double riding on a horse.



There were no movie trains on Sat & Sun September 3 and 4. These dates had long been reserved by Jim Trowbridge for his charter trains. We told the film company this at the outset, and they were fine with that. They find something else to do that day. 489 did the honors on JT’s train, while 488 and 484 in movie paint pulled the regular passenger trains. I was on JT’s train and somehow I missed the photo of the century of Pueblo & Chama RR #484 meeting our charter freight out on the line…

The Movie train went back to work on Monday, September 5. Moose Anderson came over to fire that day. It turned out we weren’t needed at all that day. The second unit guys were done and the first unit big shots had showed up. They were busy shooting the scene at the house in town. We sat on spot and made easy money all day. We had a late call in Chama at 700am, but didn’t get back to Chama until 800 that night. There were some authentic antique cars that were brought in for the scenes shot in town. One of them came over to the 484 to have its portrait taken.



Tues. Sept 6, was where the first unit gang got close ups of the real actors boarding the train at speed. They spent the morning doing this and into the afternoon. Note that the paved road didn’t show up in the close up shots.



They also did the incredible shot I mentioned much earlier using this amazing prop-caboose they made. The car had to be made oversized so that the cameras, sound and lighting could fit. It also had to be built with a false floor so young Indy could disappear out the bottom of the trunk. They built this in about 4 days. It took only a couple of hours to do the shot.




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2017 08:56PM by Earl.