And we also did films on the railways and there was one particular film called The Elizabethan Express, which was a steam train which went from King's Cross to Edinburgh, non-stop. I think it was six and a half hours and this was in about the... mid-'50s, 1954 or something like that, and we had a lot of shots to do on this train but the... the scenes that I remember the most were actually being on the footplate of this locomotive travelling between 90 and 100 miles an hour, and I was the assistant cameraman and the cameraman was Jim Ritchie and he was hand-holding this Newman Sinclair, which was a clockwork camera, And square. Yes, a very square aluminium box, which you had to keep winding up every time it started to slow down a little bit; you'd wind it up a... by clockwork, and I remember the excitement of being on the footplate because we... this thing was thundering along and you'd got this cold air coming in on one side and the... the driver by the regulator controlling the speed and watching the road ahead, and the fireman opening the boiler and this great furnace with tremendous heat coming out and this... constantly shovelling coal, tons of coal, and so you got the cold air on one side and this hot air on the other side and this tremendous feeling of speed, and then, of course, when you had to pick up water, the water would fly everywhere and, as I say, it was non-stop so they had a relief crew and alongside the... the tender where the coal was, there was a very, very narrow passageway so that one crew could leave the engine and the other crew could come from the passenger compartment to take over the train; and it... it was just... just wonderfully exciting and... we also did films that were perhaps a bit more mundane, on the... on the track. You know, about how to maintain the railway track and... extraordinary, the... the commitment that these people had. They... they worked in gangs and each gang had a section of railway line that they looked after and that was their responsibility, and they took a real pride in looking after it and making sure that everything was level and the packing was there and, you know, this... we made this instructional film really about... about doing that so one got an insight into how the railways were maintained.
