Snowdrift at Bleath Gill

A snow drift manages to trap not just a freight train, but the two snow-plough trains sent to rescue it. Sustained human effort is required to free one of these ploughs so it can be used to help free the engine and it's trucks stuck 1370-ft above sea level in several more feet of thick snow. It takes a team several days of twenty-four hour labour, coughing and spluttering as they work in sub zero temperatures, before they can make enough headway to combine with the freed plough engine to free the freight train - some 4 days after it was first stuck! This short film really does depict just how much effort was required, most of it manual and in the face of a 40-mph winds, to dig out the train and defrost it's working parts (using lighted paraffin rags for the most part). The score gets a bit carried away at times, but this is still quite a well photographed testament to workers prepared to endure all weathers to get the job done!

This short subject about how a train gets stuck in the snow and how it gets dug out and sent on its way is beautifully shot by Robert Paynter and is very funny, because it has the same sort of production values that a piece about the liberation of Paris in the Second World War might have -- but instead of expatiating about the cooperation between forces under George Patton and Bernard Montgomery, while worrying about DeGaulle's insistence that he must lead the forces into Paris, we have the Motive Power, Operating and Engineering Departments of British Railways working their way through coordinating efforts to liberate a goods train from the snow in the Westmoreland Mountains.

In the end it's up to the infantry -- in this case, men with snow shovels, although there's a lovely shot of an engine with a plow spraying snow into the air. It's hard to tell if the people who made this movie were in on the joke, or simply handling the subject the only way they knew how. In either case, it's funny.