History Main / JustTrainWrong

** Not to mention that it's impossible to let a train have Paris as a mere stopover because the six major stations in Paris are all dead-end, there is no long-distance railroad line ''through'' Paris, and trains from Basel arrive in a different station than where trains to Brussels depart. Trains can only start or terminate in Paris, but not stop.[[note]]In 1995, the [[UsefulNotes/LeMetropolitain RER D]] introduced a cross-city tunnel between Gare de Lyon and Gare du Nord, which could theoretically fit a long-distance train: however, only the commuter trains in the Île-de-France region use them.[[/note]] Traveling through Paris via train pretty much always involves changing stations via Métro and RER (which opened a year after the film's release). Unlike American transcontinental trains, a stopover in a dead-end station does not require turning the entire consist from the locomotive(s) to the last car around, European railroads would simply put another locomotive on the other end of the train and continue with that one or just use push-pull equipment, but in Paris' case, it'd require another massive detour to get to the right station or on the right line.

* The poster for the film ''Film/Creep2004'' depicts a 1972 [=Mk1=] stock Northern Line train -- the stock was withdrawn four years before the film was released.
** All but one - UsefulNotes/TheLondonUnderground keeps a single example on the disused Aldwych stub off the Piccadilly line, where ''Creep'' (and most other works involving vintage Underground trains) are filmed. It tends to stick out like a sore thumb in scenes set in the present, as it is the only unit left on the Underground still in its original unpainted state.

** To be fair, this ''is'' a GM EMD construction licensed to [=NoHAB=], pretty much an EMD F7 adapted for Europe. The EMD bulldog noses should be a dead giveaway. Nevertheless, the three headlights, the cabs on both ends and the side buffers and couplings are typical for European locomotives (the only double-cabbed US carbody diesels were six-axle Baldwin shark noses).

* ''Film/FlagsOfOurFathers'': At :43:05, [[http://fav.me/d414fp8 this]] [=EMD=] "F" unit can be seen pulling a train into Manchester, NH with New Hampshire hero Rene Gagnon aboard. While [=EMD=] was indeed building this style of locomotive starting in 1939, A careful inspection of spotting details reveals the lead loco to be an [=EMD=] [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_F9 F9]], a post-war model not introduced until 1953. A more appropriate streamliner would have been an [[http://rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2532908 EMD E7, preferably in Boston & Maine paint]].

* Film/{{Garfield}}'s movie has a scene where Garfield infiltrates a dispatcher's room and switches trains willy nilly sending them all on collision courses with one another. This would be impossible as the system would not allow the controller to switch points in front of an approaching train, and the signal system is interlocked to prohibit any movement that might cause a collision.

** It's possible this is a locomotive on loan to a company that operates in Pennsylvania (something railroads sometimes do), but that's highly unlikely to occur on just any random train. In this case, it's because while the film was set in Pennsylvania, [[CaliforniaDoubling it was shot in Illinois]].

* In ''Film/MurderOnTheOrientExpress1974'', the train copies the above mistake of operating a train from a low platform station (in reality a Paris freight terminal). The consist also includes a Pullman day coach, which never would have operated in the OrientExpress (in the UK and Europe, Pullmans are not sleeping cars).

* ''Film/PublicEnemies'': The producers decided to show a train arriving in Chicago. While Milwaukee Road #261 and its cars in their orange and maroon livery could be reasonably explained, the locomotive is anachronistic to the 1933 setting of the film. ALCO did not build that particular locomotive until 1944. Also, the orange and maroon livery the cars are wearing is [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII post-war]].
** Plus the 261 is a freight locomotive and would be unlikely to appear at Union Station.
*** The 261 was built as a dual-service locomotive during WWII, [[LightningBruiser strong enough for freight, fast enough for passenger service]], at a time the government prohibited building any purely passenger locomotives.

*** Extra cab cars are occasionally used as coaches, and when doing so, may face either direction. Still makes no sense to keep a gun there.

** Gallery cars of the type depicted do not have a bridge over the aisle, they have stairs on either side of the aisle to reach their respective sides of the mezzanine.
*** This is a side effect of shooting the interior scenes in California's Metrolink cars, while the film itself is set in Chicago.

** (Of course, it is worth giving credit to the viral team, who cobbled together a spot-on routing for the shipment (and one which would only involve three railroads, about as few as you could hope to run that train on back in 1979, as UP hadn't taken over about five other Class Is).
** It's highly unusual for a single truck to derail an entire train in the first place.
* In ''Film/TheSwarm1978'', the driver falls against the brake, shoving it forward, causing the train to speed up and crash. Pushing the brake forward applies it, and applying the brakes is how you ''stop'' the train.
** Then, when the train crashes, the unpowered coaches explode and burn instead of just the locomotive.

** Speaking of Superliners, he yells "all aboard!" while leaning out of a one. The following shot of the "departing" train is actually an arriving[[note]]Los Angeles Union Station has end-of-track barriers at every platform, which are not shown in the film. That's how we know it's actually arriving.[[/note]] train of single-level Amfleet cars[[note]]As a small nitpicky detail, the train is also shown to be headed into the station locomotive first. Typically if trains have cab cars (which this one did) and one station that has end-of-track barriers, the trains go into said station cab car first. However, the train shown is also a ''real'' operation, so it can't exactly be faulted in that regard[[/note]]. This train was also shown parked across the platform from Dave's train when he boarded it.

** However, the train was running from Italy to Croatia, so unless the footage was interspersed, it could be explained as the train crossing into Eastern Europe. (There are vineyards in Croatia) Less forgivable, is the presence of an EMD [=F7A=] unit at the head of the train, when they could have just about got away with an [=SD40=], a version of which was built in Yugoslavia (this is all a case of CaliforniaDoubling as the train scenes were shot on the Fillmore & Western Railway in California).

* Train Simulator Classic (formerly known as ''VideoGame/RailWorks'') usually places a strong emphasis on accuracy, but when the rights agreements aren't there, there can be issues. The biggest, as Dovetail Games had no deal with Virgin Trains, is the Class 390 Pendolino... in BR Intercity livery, which was only used before it was ordered. Even besides that, the game doesn't stop you from running trains on routes they have no business running on and can't run on in real life either. If you wanted to, you could run the UK Pro Range Class 313 EMU on the Hudson Line or New York To New Haven since the 313 has pantograph and third-rail capabilities. The same can be done with the Pro Range Class 315. You can run that on any route that allows the use of pantographs, regardless of the region and even on routes it's never seen on in the UK.

* ''WesternAnimation/ThomasAndFriends'' has some examples. Whilst the author of [[Literature/TheRailwaySeries the books]], Wilbert Awdry, was a railway buff who made a point of getting the details right in his books, there are many examples of unrealistic railway operation in the TV series, particularly in later seasons, as advertising new toys took precedent.

*** Likewise, a train cannot physically jump an open bridge and land on the other side unscathed that easily[[note]]There has been a few rare accidents where engines have jumped the tracks and landed back on them perfectly. In one such incident, a train running past a red signal jumped the split-frog derail and its train managed to rerail itself, though the opposing train still t-boned it anyway[[/note]], nor does a rampaging bull have enough power to completely junk the entire consist and smash the locomotive all the way to the other side of the yard and crush it to smithereens in the process.

*** Olwin takes on coal by '''opening her cab roof''' which allows the coal to fall in.

** One scene involves Rollo the Clown flagging down the snooty Farnsworth and the stubborn Pete for help in getting the stalled birthday train rolling again. Both engines manage to stop in the span of 10-15 seconds, despite Farnsworth being a fast-moving diesel hauling a small train of passenger cars, and Pete being a burly freight engine with empty freight cars behind him. In reality, both would have taken some time to stop--at least up to a mile--and certainly not in a manner of which Rollo only gets planted on the locomotive's front end or is able to side-step out of the way.
*** The same scene has Pete running very closely behind Farnsworth, arriving only a few seconds after the snooty diesel leaves. While it's true that Farnsworth being abruptly flagged down did give Pete time to catch up, railroad safety operations prohibit trains from running that closely together, just in case the one in front has an emergency (like it did here). If anything, there should have been signals keeping the trains further apart, yet they're conspicuously absent in the entire film. This is particularly troubling, since having multiple trains run in single-track territory without signals is incredibly dangerous--it was under such similar circumstances that led to Casey Jones himself meeting his end.

** The [[{{Jerkass}} Tower]] refuses to send Tillie out to relieve Georgia on the birthday train, highly fraught in his belief that she's "too little" for the job, nor does he force Farnsworth or Pete (both of whom have already refused to pull the train at this point) to take over. In reality, no railroad would let anyone get away with their employees refusing to send out a relief engine to take over a stalled train, as any train sitting out there and not moving towards its destination is not only costing time, but also money. If any train stalls, they need immediate relief as soon as possible; if the Tower had a supervisor, he would have been fired on the spot for a stunt like that.
*** The Tower is later seen sleeping on the job, another big no-no in railroad operations. Falling asleep, especially in such a safety-sensitive position like that, is bound to lead to disaster, which is why railroads take painstaking efforts to reduce fatigue among its staff.

** When Tillie starts her morning routine to switch the other engines out of the roundhouse, there's a small gap in between the rails in each stall and the turntable. Such gaps are dangerous, as any train running over them could risk derailing if they hit them funny or ran over them too fast. As such, special devices are used to close said gaps--none of which appear on this turntable.
*** The same scene shows Tillie coupling to Farnsworth and Pete using a simple hook for a link-and-chain system instead of couplers. While it could be forgiven in the sense that this is a cartoon, and sentient engines obviously don't need human crews, such a system was retired for how easy they could come apart, and automatic couplers proved to be far more of an efficient means of holding trains together.

** On the other hand, when the Soviet Union captured the previously Japanese held Southern Sakhalin, they found it uneconomical to re-gauge the Japanese-built railways, as they were built to the narrow Cape gauge (1067 mm) and with the light ballasting and loading gauges incompatible with the much heavier Soviet standards, so adapting the network to them essentially boiled down to rebuilding the whole railway anew, which they simply hadn't had the resources after the devastating war. Though they eventually widened the loading gauge and used the Soviet-made rolling stock with the Cape-adapted bogies, only after the TurnOfTheMillennium, when the island's oil industry overloaded the railway, the project to re-gauge the Sakhalin network took off in earnest, and it's projected to lag a fair bit into the New Twenties.
* Runaway trains just do not happen in normal operation, due to the entire braking system being designed in a fail-safe manner. Any loss of pressure in the brake line or command authority in an electric control system will automatically apply the brakes on any set of cars built after the 1870s, and, until the 1980s, most heavily laden trains had a brake van/caboose at the rear before that (nowadays, rear helper engines and end-of-train ([=EoT=]) devices do the same job). Almost all passenger and many freight locomotives contain alertness features that sense if there is a live operator and stop the train if there is not.
** That said, the failure safety of the braking system can be disabled by accident [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciurea_rail_disaster as in the 1917 Ciurea train disaster]], which leads to a number of runaway incidents every year. However, in modern times, due to brake test requirements, runaways are usually just parked cars or trainsets that get loose from a yard (as with the more recent [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster Lac-Mégantic rail disaster]]).

** Not to mention great underestimations regarding speeds. Some seem to believe that if cars aren't allowed to go faster than 50[[superscript:km]]∕[[subscript:h]] in towns (60 on major roads), so are trains. In reality, even freight trains pass through towns at 100 or 120[[superscript:km]]∕[[subscript:h]], and the maximum speed allowed on grade crossing is 160[[superscript:km]]∕[[subscript:h]], regardless whether it's in a town or not.

*** In the US, NJ Transit engineers get at least three days off in this situation. At Metro-North, the engineer who was operating the Harlem Line train involved in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla_train_crash Valhalla wreck]] has been unable to return to work and has had to retire.

* After a train derailed in the UK, the spokesperson for the train company praised the heroic driver for "staying at his controls and helping to keep the train upright and prevent more casualties". Some media even took this as far as saying that he steered the train to safety. As anyone, even a small child, with any knowledge of how railways work knows, trains cannot be steered and go where the rails take them, and once they are off the rails there is nothing anyone can do beyond throwing in the emergency brakes and holding on.
** With the same accident, there was also praise about how well the at the time new train had stood up with just superficial damage and just one fatality. It was said to be "built like a tank", and there were many comments about "if it had been one of the old trains this would have been much worse". For those people thinking that passenger cars on trains ought to have "crumple zones" like on automobiles, a train crash does not "work" like a car crash. Maximum decelerations are much lower, and the main danger to passengers is being crushed by the carriages deforming. This was particularly evident with the old-style body-on-chassis construction where carriages would "telescope" into the end of each other with the chassis of one destroying the body of the next along with the people inside. Modern carriages - such as the BR Mk 3 introduced in the 70s and subsequent designs based on it - are designed to resist crash loads, especially end loading, ''without'' deforming. This is very evident when comparing photographs of severe crashes of old-construction trains, with mangled piles of wreckage, to photos of high-speed crashes of modern deformation-resistant stock, where the carriages are scattered about the landscape but remain more or less intact. See for instance Hatfield, Great Heck, Esschede; most of the carriages are little damaged apart from one or two that broke their back against an OLE mast or that were crushed by a bridge falling on them, and it is in those damaged carriages that the majority of deaths and serious injuries occurred.

* Unrealistic scale is common in rail modelling. For example, curves are usually much tighter compared to the width of the track than on a real railway, simply because a true scale curve would be enormous, and wheels and rails are usually thicker-than-scale for sufficient strength. Most modelers don't mind this, but "fine scale" modelers strive for greater precision. Indeed, the availability of closer-to-realistic model railway equipment has increased dramatically since the 1990s.
** The most common gauge used in UK modelling, OO (1:76[[LudicrousPrecision .2]], or 4mm to the foot), is a "bastard scale" that's technically an example of this trope, with 4mm-scale models running on 3.5mm-scale track. It was originally designed to allow more room for clockwork mechanisms inside models of UK locomotives (which were slightly smaller than their European and American counterparts), but still running on the same HO (1:87, or 3.5mm to the foot) track. This means many models have a slightly "narrow-gauge" look when viewed head-on. EM gauge, and the even more precise P4, are "fine scale" variants, with (usually) hand-built track at true 4mm scale.

* It is a strange habit of US based municipal projects to use stock photos of British or European steam locomotives to represent the municipalities "train heritage." Examples include [[https://www.uintacountyherald.com/article/mural-goes-full-steam-ahead this mural in Evanston, Wyoming]] which is a vague bastardization of US and European influences, [[https://www.google.com/maps/@41.2304729,-85.3196279,3a,37.5y,319.01h,83.59t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sXdxoH2HxD19skllZMMRnsg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DXdxoH2HxD19skllZMMRnsg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D47.09908%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 another mural]] in Churubusco, Indiana showing a European locomotive at an American train station, the police patch of [[https://www.facebook.com/HeberCityPolice/photos/a.174396102611804/3305974542787262/ Heber City, Utah]] which shows an obviously British locomotive design with the words "HEBER CREEPER" emblazoned on the side, and the US Postal Service using an LMS Black 5 4-6-0 steam locomotive from the UK [[https://www.postaltimes.com/postalnews/stamp-collectors-say-the-u-s-postal-service-is-off-track-with-a-recent-train-poster/ on a poster]] to advertise the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first American transcontinental railroad in 2019 (as shown above in the Advertising tropes section as well). What makes this stranger is that many of the towns and government agencies guilty of this are often a few blocks away from active heritage railroads or museums were they could have easily got a photo of a local train in preservation as a reference instead of sourcing stock images of trains on the opposite side of the world.
** An egregious example from the US's Federal Railroad Administration's [[https://www.facebook.com/USDOTFRA/videos/837367887154610 Facebook page]], using footage from the Sauschwänzlebahn in Germany to describe the Strasburg Railroad in Pennsylvania.
** The FRA's [[https://railroads.dot.gov/highway-rail-crossing-and-trespasser-programs/train-horn-rulequiet-zones/train-horn-rule-and-quiet official brochure]] for establishing quiet zones along the tracks features a British Class 323 EMU very prominently on the cover, a train which has never remotely come close to being seen in the United States.

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.