Plot
The residents of the (fictional) rural village of Titfield rely on the railway branch line to commute to work and transport their produce to market. So they are shocked when the government announces that the line is to be closed. Particularly hard hit is the local vicar, railway enthusiast Rev. Sam Weech (George Relph); he comes up with the idea to run it locally. He and the local squire, Gordon Chesterford (John Gregson), persuade wealthy Walter Valentine (Stanley Holloway) to provide the financial backing by telling him they can legally operate a bar while the train is running – he will not have to wait all morning for the local pub to open.
The branch line supporters are bitterly opposed by bus operators Alec Pearce (Ewan Roberts) and Vernon Crump (Jack MacGowran), but, despite the fears of town clerk George Blakeworth (Naunton Wayne), the supporters persuade the Ministry of Transport to grant them a month's trial period with an inspection at the end. Dan Taylor (Hugh Griffith), a retired railway worker, knows how to run an engine and joins the venture.
On the maiden run, Crump and Pearce try to block a crossing, first with their lorry and then with a passing steam roller operated by Harry Hawkins (Sid James), but the steam locomotive is too powerful and pushes them off the track. The next day, Crump and Pearce persuade an irate Hawkins to shoot holes in the water tower, but the passengers form a bucket brigade and refill the engine from a nearby stream using buckets from the nearby farm. Defeated, Crump proposes a merger, but is turned down.
The night before the inspection, Hawkins, Crump and Pearce use the steamroller to tow the unguarded engine and coach down the gradient. It runs off the track where the three men have removed a rail. Blakeworth is mistakenly blamed and arrested.
Taylor and Valentine get drunk together and decide to "borrow" an engine from the Mallingford yards, but end up driving the engine along the main street of Mallingford and finally running the locomotive into a large oak tree. They are arrested.
Weech decides to get the antique but still-functional Thunderbolt from the museum, and after liberating Blakeworth from the law, they persuade the mayor to support them. They also commandeer Dan Taylor's home, an old railway carriage body, which is hastily strapped to a flatcar.
With Taylor's arrest, Weech is left without a fireman/stoker. Fortunately, the vicar's friend and fellow railway devotee, Ollie Matthews (Godfrey Tearle), the Bishop of Welchester, is visiting and, nothing loathe, is hurriedly drafted in to assist. Meanwhile, Pierce and Crump see Thunderbolt from the road and, distracted, run their bus into a police lorry and are also arrested.
Weech and Chesterford also have to improvise a means of connecting the engine to the rest of the train since the coupling method had greatly changed since Thunderbolt's heyday. The village craftsman uses a length of rope, but warns Chesterford to be careful.
As they are about to start their run, the police demand to be carried to Mallingford with their four prisoners. The Ministry inspector (John Rudling) refuses to adjust the starting time for the delay.
During a braking test, the rope snaps, and Thunderbolt leaves the carriages behind. However, several villagers turn out and manage to quietly push the carriages to meet up again with Thunderbolt, with the inspector none the wiser. Joan Hampton (Gabrielle Brune) has to promise to marry Hawkins to get him to lend them the chain from his roller's steering mechanism to replace the broken rope.
The train pulls into Mallingford station nearly ten minutes late. The villagers worry that this will prove their downfall, but it turns out that if they had been just a bit faster, they would have exceeded the speed limit for light railways. Instead, the line passes inspection, clearing the way for the Light Railway Order to be granted.
Read more about this topic: The Titfield Thunderbolt
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)