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Author Topic: "Hell on Wheels" TV series - Union Pacific in the late 1860s  (Read 1142 times)
Marlburian
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« on: May 17, 2021, 17:00:18 »

I've been ploughing through the five series of "Hell on Wheels", about the construction of the Union Pacific in the late 1860s.  I caught some episodes a few years ago when they were screened on an obscure terrestrial channel which I don't think bothered with the last series or two.

I started off with the DailyMotion streaming service but just as I got partway through Series Four all the uploads were pulled for copyright reasons. But using the Yandex browser I found various offerings, some dubbed in Russian, one even in Russian with German sub-titles, and eventually one in the original English.

I'm now halfway through the fifth and final series, which prominently features Chinese labourers. The action switches between the Union Pacific and Central Pacific work-camps, with a few interludes elsewhere. It does not show the Mormons in a very good light and I'm surprised that there seem to have been no protests about this.

The same venerable locomotive features a lot, with an assortment of rolling stock. Some of the track-laying is curious - across a frozen lake, sleepers laid on verdant grass, tight curves. One episode has Chinese labourers hauling a loco on a sledge over snow, only for it to get away from them on a steep slope, with spectacular results.
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