History Main / JustTrainWrong

Easily, the number one mistake is showing a steam locomotive without a tender or bunker and tanks -- which usually means that it doesn't have any fuel or water and therefore can't move -- or having no rods to move it or a mishmash of rods and wheels in all the wrong places. And even if there is a tender, it often looks like one big fuel bunker on wheels with nowhere to put the water. Other common departures from reality might involve a RunawayTrain's safety systems [[FailsafeFailure failing]] without any justifiable reason, or the wrong kind of train or rolling stock for the script. Whenever a train appears, it'll almost always be blasting its horn or whistle (if even that, as sometimes they'll use whistles on diesels and horns on steam engines instead of vice-versa), when in real life trains are only meant to sound their horns and/or whistles at set points along the route such as at level crossings, or if there's something or someone on the track. But, hey, most viewers don't know or care what the proper train would look like, ''or'' the ins-and-outs of railway operations. And more often than not, in media that may involve trains or railroads in general as part of the premise, the engineer is commonly incorrectly referred to as the "conductor". Conductors look after trains and make sure they are safe to ride on or operate. Engineers instead operate the trains themselves and focus on driving them from one place to another. Another thing many pieces of media get wrong about trains are the coupler designs. Many of these trains are depicted with a very cheaply designed coupling system with two links held together by a dinky little bolt with only one large cap on the top which makes the whole coupler system look like it came from a tractor and a trailer. It's possible that these couplers are a more simplistic take on the "Link and Pin" couplers from the mid to late 1800s which were the very first couplers used on American railroads, hence why they're used more often than a more accurate "Knuckle Coupler" design which were created in the late 1800s which eventually replaced all link and pin couplers on many modern-day railroads.

* Read any given English language article on UsefulNotes/HighSpeedRail and look for the mistakes. It's fun! Classics include mixing up average and top speeds ("UsefulNotes/{{China}} runs trains at 300 km/h whereas hours only average 50 mph"), calling it "the" or "a" high speed rail, as if the rail itself was somehow high speed (no it's not, "high speed rail" is shorthand for "rail vehicles and technology that allow operation at high speed" the physical line is called [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a "high speed ''line''"]]), getting usual ticket costs wrong, weird notions on what a "profitable" rail line means and of course lots and lots of misconceptions on how trains work. No, high speed rail will not simply use the existing single-track infrastructure. No, there will be no level crossings with trains passing at 200 mph. No, high-speed rail does not use Diesel ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterCity_125 except when it does)]]. And no, high-speed rail does not usually share track with freight services (mostly because timing the high-speed trains to avoid deadly collisions with the slower but heavier freight trains would give traffic control personnel a nightmare). Some of this can be excused by HSR simply not existing in most of the Anglosphere.

* The train chase in the Young Indy sequence of ''Film/{{Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade}}'' is filmed at the Cumbres & Toltec in New Mexico, which runs K-36 Mikados, not built until 1925. The scene is set in the 1910s.