For 1900, this short Robert Paul feature is very well done. Even the year this was made, people like the Lumiere Bros were still turning out scenes of everyday life which when seen today are pretty dull, despite being so short. However, "A Railway Collision" is an early example of an action movie--it manages, in its short run-time, to show an exciting event that must have struck audiences with terror. In fact, if you want to know the truth, I at first did not get it was a model (but that was before I saw the film). I saw it, read reviews on Letterboxd, and THEN it became apparent. In fact, it's pretty obvious now looking at it. But for the time, audiences must have freaked out at seeing two trains crash. Truly a great achievement for 1900.

A train, waiting in front of a tunnel, is suddenly struck by another train emerging from the tunnel. This is one of the earliest cases of models being used for rail cars, although at least a couple of the Edison battle recreations of the Spanish-American War were shot in bathtubs.This film was made possible by the rise of model railroading. Although to the modern eye, this is obviously model work, the moviegoer of the era would not be so ready to recognize the fakery and so this must have been a very exciting film for the period. Within a few years, American film-makers were crashing real locomotives for the movie-going public, but doubtless producer Robert Paul found this less expensive method much more profitable.