American Trains-The Illinois Railway Museum

Rating:
Summary: Save your money, this DVD isn't worth it.
Review: Ok, when I purchased this DVD, I knew that I wasn't going to see lots of heavy railroad 'action' from this video about a museum, since museums have many static displays of inoperable equipment. However, the IRM does have many operational pieces that should provide some good footage to the train enthusiast.

Being a transit enthusiast, and a 'train freak' in general, I thought that the views of old streetcars and els and those wonderful streamliners would make the purchase worthwhile.

Unfortunately, this video fell very short of my expectations.

The DVD is divided into subject matter, such as trolley, diesel, steam, etc.
There are actually two narrators. One is Les Jarret, who you never see, and the other is some museum volunteer who is, to put it bluntly, not too attractive to look at. He appears several times in the video. Honestly, I did not pay almost $28 to look at this museum volunteer.

Despite the dull nature of this video, there are some good shots of Chicago Green Hornet PCC cars, and earlier Pullman built monitor roof trolleys. You do get to see some other Chicago equipment, such as the 4000 and 6000 series lightweight elevated cars.

During the video, you get to see some split second glimpses of other pieces of equipment, such as the wonderfully sculpted 2000 series Chicago rapid transit cars in their wonderful bicentennial paint scheme! But you only barely notice it.

You also get a two-second look at the marvelous Little Joe Electric locomotives that were originally destined to be exported to Russia, but were used domestically instead. Wow, that machine looks amazing in action - but you only get to see two seconds of it!

The other parts of this video shows you how a steam engine is fired up. This was quite interesting. And there is a segment showing a Shay locomotive and how its gears turn to move the locomotive. Very interesting to look at.

The video quality leaves much to be desired, however. During several sequences, there are annoying vertical lines all over the screen. And when the fabulous Electroliner was shown, there was an awful grid pattern interfering with the orange stripes on the cars. At first I thought it might be my tv or dvd player, and that concerned me because I have just bought a new tv and dvd player. After I watched the video, I took it to my other tv and dvd player, viewed the scenes in question on that tv, and wouldn't you know it, it showed up there too. Better a bad dvd than a bad television.

The Illinois Railway Museum looks like it has a fine collection of equipment that any train enthusiast would enjoy. But the production quality just isn't there with this DVD. If only they could have shown a montage of much more of their equipment, set it to some appropriate music, and made a better film transfer, it might be worth it.

Can't give it more than two stars at this point.