Nostalgia & History > Timmy and Lassie Drive A SP Passenger Conductor Nuts

There's a video posted on "everyone's favorite Internet video showcasing platform" that shows an episode of "Lassie" featuring SP E units, PAs and vintage 1950s era passenger cars.  It looks like it was filmed at Chatsworth or Santa Susana and other locations along SP's Coast line near Moorpark before the entire area was destroyed with massive urbanization.    

The plot has Lassie, Timmy and Timmy's mother and father causing all sorts of complications and heartache to Southern Pacific.  No wonder D.J. Russell was convinced that passenger trains should be discontinued!  
  
To find the video, go to "everyone's favorite Internet video showcasing platform (tm),"  and type the following on their internal search engine:     

Lassie - Episode #239 - "The Trip" - Season 7 Ep. 20 - 01/29/1961

🎵  Gonna take an existential journey... 🎵

Dave, this demonstrates what generally is not known amongst classic TV aficionados, that in this episode, Lassie was a canine "vehicle" intended to convey the deeply conflicted nature - existential angst, if you will - of SP during the Russel years. I mean, here is a dejected veteran train crew hoping to put the screws to the company by dying on the law, knowing that the already relaxed Russel-era schedule* can't withstand too much by way of further delays caused by such things as holding the train, "Friendly"-like, so that Timmy could water Lassie in the baggage car, or likewise standing around on the ground with their thumbs in their pockets discussing about how standing around with their thumbs in their pockets is delaying the train. Dramatic irony at its best!

*I note that the next stop beyond their departure point - Santa Susanna, it appears - is a three minute one at Coalville, which which seems lengthy for a small burg that doesn't appear in the timetable, or the list of California place names, but worse, the following stop (Blugulum? I'm having trouble with the players' accents) is fifteen minutes. It must be a tank town where the Daylight is scheduled to  take on water, make a lunch stop for the lack of a dining car, or perhaps make a second loco change. Putting two and two together, SP's notoriously faulty maintenance had already occasioned the substitution of the E9 by a PA somewhere between Santa Susanna and Coalville.

Unfortunately, I can't expound further upon the episode, because I jumped off the train before Lassie; never even made it to Coalville. I could not stand "Lassie" as a kid any more than I could countenance "My Friend Flicka". It was The Three Stooges, or nothing, in those days, and the same goes double now, except that the Stooges wore thin in about 1963. And what IS it with little girls and horses, anyway? What were we talking about, again?

EO
Wx4.org

(below) "No hurry, folks, we'll be dead on the law by Blugulum, anyway."


 



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/19 05:57 by hogheaded.

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Am I the only one that noticed the train arrival was at a station with the active track right at the station platform, adjacent to the building, but when they apparently first board at the location pictured above, it's a completely different station?  Or are they the only ones, as an entire family, to get off and ask questions at a brief flag-stop-appearing station stop enroute? 

I don't think I've ever watched this much an episode of "Lassie" before today. I was never a fan. But that trick where Lassie fetches the mail is pretty cool.

But what intrigues me, so cal agent, is why you keep referring to YouTube as "everyone's favorite Internet video showcasing platform (tm)?"

Why don't you just say YouTube?

walstib Wrote:
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>
> But what intrigues me, so cal agent, is why you
> keep referring to YouTube as "everyone's
> favorite Internet video showcasing platform
> (tm)?"
>
> Why don't you just say YouTube?

I judge that he merely is being sensitive to Todd's sensitivities.
EO

> walstib Wrote:
> But what intrigues me, so cal agent, is why you keep referring to YouTube as "everyone's favorite Internet video showcasing platform (tm)?" Why don't you just say YouTube?

> hogheaded Wrote:
> I judge that he merely is being sensitive to Todd's sensitivities.

hogheaded is correct.  For some reason, YouTube can be mentioned and linked to in responding posts, but not initial ones.  You'll have to ask Todd why that is.  Here's the link to the video:

https://youtu.be/jIDDWTK2hgc  

So, in the screenshot posted by hogheaded, can we assume that is Chatsworth?  The hills in the distance would match, and you can see the train coming around a curve on its arrival, which would also match.  I think the name of the train was referred to by Timmy as "The Comet," although we are nowhere near the Seaboard Air Line.  They have a bogus station sign partially showing, which I think is the ficticious town of "Calverton", where Timmy & Co. supposedly live.  The one scene that was puzzling and may have been on a Hollywood set was where there was a high-level platform and a UP sleeper was in the background.  I noticed a state highway sign in the background in the scene where Lassie jumped out of the truck and the highway number is consistent with what one could see in Moorpark.  Also, there appears to be a grain sorting mill on the left side of the track as Timmy was looking out the back of the train.  I Iooked at some aerial photos from "historic aerials" and there appears to have been one in Moorpark circa 1961 when the episode was filmed. 

I have to admit that, when I was in my formative years, my family and I regularly watched "Lassie."  I even sent in a certain number of Campbell's soup lables so I could get an official "Lassie" wallet!  There are also other fans of "Lassie" that have established Internet websites where they obsess over all the episodes, but I don't think they're as off-the-scale as Trekkie fans where they get into costumes and role-playing at annual conventions.  I seem to remember another episode of "Lassie" (after Timmy grew up too much and she had to be passed off to the forest ranger dude) where she was hanging around with a railroad track inspector and was riding with him on his Fairmont motor car over some impressive trestles.  Maybe it was filmed on the Sterling City Branch.  One positive feature of the show (perhaps the ONLY one?) is that they did do a lot of on-location filming.  I saw one of the colorized later episodes the other night and it looked like it was filmed at a dam along the Columbia River Gorge. 

As hokey as the show was, it did offer some good, wholesome entertainment to little kids in that small window of time before they transition from the innocence of childhood to the cynacism of adulthood.  I bought some episodes of "Lassie" on DVD for my daughter to enjoy when she was little, and she really did enjoy them.  Now that she's almost a teenager, I probably couldn't pay her to watch them.   There's a reason why we don't subscribe to cable and we don't miss it a bit.  We also watch very little of what is currently being offered on TV.  Garbage, with way too much reference to all things sexual, but that's just my opinion.  And on-location filming is almost non-existent because it's too expensive.  I enjoy watching episodes of "Highway Patrol" because almost every episode was filmed on location in Southern California during the late 1950s, before the area was overrun with way too many people and took on that Third World appearance.          

Clearly, to be watching old episodes of "Lassie" in search of trains illustrates that I must have too much time on my hands!  Actually, this episode was brought to my attention on another Internet railfan venue, so I must not be the only one with too much time on his hands.     
 



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/19 18:18 by CA_Sou_MA_Agent.

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What I recall most about Lassie was the old hand crank telephone and somebody named "operator".
Totally missed any episodes with trains. If I recall Lassie aired Sunday nights. We watched it after Sunday Night Prayer Meetings. Everything was so wholesome back then! I was probably 10 years old, seems like a century ago.
Gonut

I remember one verision I think in the 60s where Lassie is riding a flat car pulled by an EMD switcher. I believe it was street running. The loco was either Santa Fe or Southern Pacific. I was about ten years old at the time and watched it in Germany, in German, IIRC (in color?)..

 Victor A. Baird
http://www.erstwhilepublications.com

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/03/19 16:59 by wabash2800.

Okay. Call me dumb or anything you want but I can't get it to come up.  I don't belong to FB or any of those public things.


Nudge

Try this:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIDDWTK2hgc

walstib Wrote:
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> Try this:
>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIDDWTK2hgc
This doesn't link up either...
G

It worked for me. You probably need to cut and paste the URL into your browser.

From 1969, here's an episode that was filmed on the Roaring Camp & Big Trees narrow gauge railroad in Felton, CA

Lassie - Episode #511 - The Sky is Falling" - Season 16, Ep. 8 - 11/16/1969

https://youtu.be/iI9X-i7JOms

Lassie, what is it girl?  Timmy's in the tender?

From the Internet Movie Data Base

28 Feb. 1965   Look Homeward Lassie Part 2   Season 11 Episode 24   While Corey recuperates in the hospital, Lassie journeys homeward. A prospector confines her in his barn with his mule who helps her escape. Next the collie hops a freight train and joins two runaway boys, one of whom becomes quite ill.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I stumbled across this one by reading the plot descriptions on the IMDB.  It was filmed in Soledad Canyon and they show the station at Ravenna.  After that the scene changes to the Sierra Railroad where Lassie almost gets creamed by a train on a trestle.  That would have brought the series to an abrupt end!   

https://youtu.be/kanRdTnEbWI
The railroad scenes begin at the 32:06 mark 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/19 01:51 by CA_Sou_MA_Agent.

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wabash2800 Wrote:
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> I remember one verision I think in the 60s where Lassie is riding a flat car pulled by an EMD switcher. I believe it was street running. The loco was either Santa Fe or Southern Pacific. I was about ten years old at the time and watched it in Germany, in German, IIRC (in color?)..
 
Do you remember anything more about the plot?  The Internet Movie Data Base has a brief description of each episode and every episode is now online.  Maybe we can track it down.