Road & Rail

A Journey Pack for a train should have trains in it. This Reel collects the films that railways, carmakers and highway lobbies made about moving across America, plus a few of the earliest travelling-camera films ever shot.

It begins with Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896), the Lumière film that, according to legend, made audiences flinch, and with The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first Western and the first film to be built around a locomotive. Interior N.Y. Subway, 14th St. to 42nd St. (1905) was shot from a work train following the first subway cars with a rig of lights; A Trip Down Market Street (1906) mounted a camera on the front of a cable car four days before the San Francisco earthquake. Both are on the National Film Registry.

The railway films of the 1940s and 50s were made to defend an industry that was losing passengers. This Is My Railroad (1946, Southern Pacific) and A Great Railroad at Work (1942, New York Central) are wartime portraits of the systems at full stretch; Wheels A-Rolling (1948) records the Chicago Railroad Fair pageant; Big Trains Rolling (1955) and Mainline U.S.A. (1957), both made for the Association of American Railroads, are the industry's answer to the Interstate Highway Act.

The road films are their rivals' reply. The American Road (1953) was Ford's fiftieth-anniversary history of the automobile; Freedom of the American Road (1955), also Ford, and Give Yourself the Green Light (1954, General Motors) lobbied openly for the federal highway programme that passed in 1956. Freedom Highway (1956) is Greyhound's answer: a cross-country bus ride with a script. Road Runners (1952) is an early look at teenage drivers.

The Reel ends with two amateur and regional travelogues, Trading Centers of the Pacific Coast (1947) and a 1947 amateur "Travel/Cities" reel, of the kind that turn up by the thousand in the Prelinger home-movie collection. Set your pack to "learn" and let the landscape roll.