Nostalgia & History > As seen on TV

There's a TV station in Seattle that re-runs a lot of old reruns, and I have been enjoying seeing a lot of old railroad scenes. I thought I'd share a few.

First picture is a quick screen shot from Emergency. There is an SP switcher going down the tracks next to a freeway off ramp somewhere in Los Angeles. The boys from Station 51 are responding to an incident right next to the tracks. Can anybody identify the location?

Dragnet and Adam-12 have some rail tidbits, too. There is one episode of Dragnet where Joe and Bill drive past a downtown Santa Fe ticket office. You can see the Santa Fe sign out the rear window of their Galaxy 500. I couldn't quite place the exact location.

On Adam-12, Reed and Malloy come screeching up to Union Station where they get into a shootout with some guy on the patio next to the waiting room. No interior shots, but there's a great view of what the driveway and area around the station looked like.

The video is a scene from an old favorite Perry Mason episode. It's the episode where a fugitive clown is accused of tossing the murder weapon from a train north of Los Angeles. Watch the video and see what Lt. Tragg has to say about it.

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I'm a bit of a Perry Mason nut and that clip has some trivia in it....The great character actor Kenneth Tobey is playing the district attorney. Tobey was famous for the 1950 movie " The thing from outer space"....this episode took place during the time that the original actor William Talman, who portrayed DA "Hamilton Burger" was suspended from the series after being arrested for lewd behavior at a house party. Talman was later found not guilty and re-instated to the role after many protests by the regular actors.

Good find..it's always nice to see the RR's portrayed on the screen. The other day the great Hitchcock movie ' Shadow of a doubt" was on, and it had several scenes of the Santa Rosa, California station and an SP passenger train.

I wondered why Burger was absent from that episode.

Fascinating trivia, too, thanks. I looked up Talman's arrest -- he was allegedly found naked at a marijuana party when the narcotics squad raided the party.

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The quick screen shot from Emergency was taken in Long Beach on the west side of the Los
Angeles River, just north of Ocean Blvd. On the right side of the photo in the background
is the horseshoe trestle that the S.P. used to across the Los Angeles river and reach
an industrial area on the east side of the river. The track the locomotive is on runs south
and serves the dock area just west of the Queen Mary.

If you visit historic aerials dot com website and search the 1970s era images of west Long
Beach you can clearly see where this shot was taken.

Many Background shots on Adam-12 were shot on " Santa Fe " Ave, where the Great Santa Fe had a Freight Station, as seen in opening shots.