🚂 Sneak Peek: The Big Train (and the Bigger Ego Behind It) Between training my tortoise to fetch sli Written: October 21, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt2jAOU2rto 🚂 Sneak Peek: The Big Train (and the Bigger Ego Behind It) Between training my tortoise to fetch slippers, and digging through Ed Wood’s forgotten vaults, I’ve fallen down another rabbit hole—vintage railroad propaganda films. Case in point: The Big Train (1950s, New York Central). It starts all proud and polished—gleaming locomotives, rich narration, and execs bragging about their “modern empire.” But then the tone flips, and the last 8 minutes are basically a tantrum about how the government ruined their monopoly because highways and airports are “free.” Watching it now, it’s wild—because that same railroad was so mismanaged it had to be rescued by the very government they’re whining about. Even funnier, that grand old steam engine at the start? You’ve seen it before—it’s the same one used later in Will Smith’s Wild Wild West. The ones that escaped the scrapyard are still rolling, and their stories are gold. There’s a whole universe of these films out there, freely available for anyone to study, mock, and marvel at—and I’ll be digging into them on Nitetime.net soon. 🎥 Watch The Big Train here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt2jAOU2rto Stay tuned—after Halloween wraps up, we might just swap spooky for smokey.