YMMV / Supertrain

• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's The Love Boat (though closer to a mystery dramedy rather than a romantic comedy) on a train. A nuclear-powered train. This makes it look both too sci-fi (which it is not) and too derivative for its intended audience, and the Three Mile Island incident occurring less than two months after the show's premiere made that premise alienating to everyone else as well, while railroad enthusiasts found too many issues with the train to enjoy the series. It lasted only five months and nine episodes before it got pulled off the air, and then disappeared outright, never being syndicated or put on home video.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Apparently, it was quite popular in France. It probably helped that, unlike the US, France had electric bullet trains by 1979 and was rapidly embracing nuclear energy in the wake of the oil crises (having never experienced the anti-nuclear backlash from Three-Mile Island).
• Harsher in Hindsight: Considering how close the failure of this series (combined with the Olympic fiasco) came to destroying NBC, the page quote, from the first episode, could be about NBC itself.
  "You're letting your psychotic fascination with railroads lead you into a suicidal gamble for the future of this company!"
• Unintentional Period Piece: If the year 1979 could be distilled into a television series, this would be it. Like many expensive flops, everything about it is very dated, from the disco soundtrack to the costumes and set design.

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