Unstoppable

Last night, John, Judy and Matthew came over for pizza. They brought along their DVD of a great 2010 train movie, Unstoppable, about a runaway train rumbling through Pennsylvania and efforts to stop it. We are all train aficionados, but I think just about anyone -- not Mama, because of the language! -- would enjoy this one. The action in this action film begins early and just keeps up until the end. (As one reviewer inevitably noted, it is unstoppable.)

Inspired, as the film notes, by an actual event, the story veers far from historical reality but kept me focused for the full hour and forty minutes as events raced ahead. I don’t have a long attention span for movies, and so that is high praise from me. If you haven’t seen it, suspend your disbelief for a while and enjoy. Even if you know the ending (more or less) based on what actually happened, you will still get caught up in the movie.

[Spoiler alert!] The CSX 8888 incident, also known as the Crazy Eights incident, which inspired the movie, involved an unmanned runaway train led by CSX Transportation locomotive #8888, an EMD SD40-2, that was pulling a freight train consisting of 47 cars, some of them loaded with Molten Phenol, a highly explosive and largely toxic chemical. The train ran uncontrolled for two hours at speeds up to 51 miles per hour (82 km/h) through the U.S. state of Ohio. It was finally brought to a stop with the help of a railroad crew in a second locomotive which caught up with the runaway and coupled to the rear car. (This is taken from Wikipedia. If you want to read the whole thing to compare to the movie storyline, click on the link in red above.)