GB 1960 1hr 09mins Dir: Ernest Morris Starring: Norman Wooland and Jane Hylton
An ex-con kidnaps his young son and heads for Inverness not knowing that his son is diabetic and needs insulin injections to survive
This train-bound drama is now rather overlooked, and despite being no more than a B-movie it is actually quite tightly written. It really does become a race against time as the police try to track down the sick boy’s whereabouts. Although notable to most as marking the film debut of a very young Dennis Waterman, it unsurprisingly features a lot of railway footage. Euston station appears at the beginning, with Norman Wooland alighting from a train that has arrived in the hands of a ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0, but most of the station scenes that follow appear to use the Eastern Region (King’s Cross perhaps, or Liverpool Street?) as the coaching stock carries the ‘E’ letter prefix. Mk.1 coaches are visible in these scenes, yet the only locomotive we see is a lower three-quarters glimpse of ex-LNER V2 Class 2-6-2 No.60890 pulling away. The journey to Inverness is then depicted by a number of shots of passing expresses which seem to have been filmed on Midland Region lines. There are many rather indistinct night time run-bys but locomotives that appear in the daytime shots include a pair of ex-LMS ‘Royal Scot’ Class 6P 4-6-0’s passing through a station, and an ex-LMS Class 5MT ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 on a van train. In addition to this, another ‘Black Five’ 4-6-0 also features in the form of No.45003, which is seen arriving at Kings Langley for Abbots Langley. Finally, three further stations feature, but all are again as yet unknown. One shows Jane Hylton on the platform as Eastern Region coaching stock pulls out, and the other shows the view of the rear of a departing train as seen from inside the station buffet (possibly back-projection showing a Southern Region train). Both are described in the film as being ‘Perth’. The final station scene shows a train of Mark 1 coaching stock in a station referred to as ‘Blair Atholl’.