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Television Broadcast Videos

Engineering Tragedy: The Ashtabula Train Disaster (Preproduction Trailer)

A long story still has to earn the first minute. This is a preproduction trailer for Engineering Tragedy: The Ashtabula Train Disaster, and it runs about a minute and a quarter. It opens as a Beacon Productions presentation. The credit on the soundtrack is a Len and Patty Brown film. The machine transcript heard the first name as Lin. The narration states the date, Friday, December 29, 1876, and the train, the Pacific Express No. 5, moving through a blizzard toward Ashtabula, Ohio. The machine transcript heard the town as Astrobula. The title on the library page is Ashtabula. The trailer says a bridge over a gorge, and a design it calls fatal, killed 97 people. It then lists what the film says followed: heroes and thieves, a city pulled together, an investigation, new laws. It does not try to tell the whole story. It tells you the story is large. Another company hiring Beacon for this kind of video is buying the minute that has to carry a much longer piece. A museum, a broadcaster, a railroad, or a nonprofit with a history can point people at a feature and still lose them. A trailer says what happened and why a viewer should care, before anyone commits to the full running time. They did not need the feature cut to introduce the story. They needed a short video that states the stakes. That is what this video is for.