"Unstoppable" is no low budget "made for video" movie. Fox spent over $90 million on the production, which stars Denzel Washington as an engineer and Chris Pine as his young conductor. The movie includes a locomotive rollover and explosion scene costing $1.5 million (for 30 seconds on the screen). It also has a rather spectacular highway crossing crash filmed at Turtle Point, PA and a less believable boxcar sideswipe. (The car, actually a prop made from wood and fiberglass, shatters into confetti and that wouldn't have happened it it had been steel.)

Tony Scott, a Brit who directed hits like "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Top Gun", stages crashes and special effects w/o using animation or models. The railroad scenes were filmed on Western New York & Pennsylvania's ex-PRR line between Olean, NY and Emporium, PA. The Nittany & Bald Eagle RR and the W&LE were also used as locations.

As other posters have pointed out, "Unstoppable" is a fanciful expansion on the case of a CSX runaway in Ohio a few years back. There are typical Hollywood touches, but Scott did strive to make the railroad action as close to reality as possible. Just the same, you will pick out a couple of real "clangers". (They're not hard to spot.) Still, in comparison to some of the railroad stuff I've seen Hollywood release, this is a workmanlike job - and it will be entertaining for the non-railroad public.