Features rare footage of a tug of war between two steam locomotives, actual documentary footage of the activities in the Miles City yard, and what is believed to be the only motion picture footage of a dynamometer car from the steam railroad era.
This film was photographed and released in two formats: a standard 1.33:1 version in 35mm and a 2:1 Spoor-Berggren Natural Vision Process (wide-screen version) in 65mm, shown only at the the State Lake Theatre in Chicago, IL, in November 1930, and the Mayfair Theatre in New York City in December 1930.
In the 12/15/1930 "New York Times" review of the film, critic Mordaunt Hall wrote that the film was "pictured" in the Spoor-Berggren process, adding that it filled the screen from side to side of the Mayfair Theatre in New York City. Hall included a paragraph giving technical information about the wide-screen process.
The railroad depicted in this film is the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, simply known as the Milwaukee Road. At its peak, around the time of this film, it operated over 11,000 miles of track in the upper Midwest and Northwest of the US.
Enough 1930 Chicago buildings have survived to make it possible to reconstruct the train's filmed entrance to Chicago, coming in from the west on Milwaukee Road tracks at ground level, and making a sweeping right turn to parallel the west side of the Chicago River on final approach southbound into Union Station, passing by the loading docks of the curving Braun Bottles building and the massive Seng Terminal Warehouse, now gone. Much of what was open-air track in 1930 is now covered by high-rises such as the Boeing building.
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