Shadow of the Smokies Tour

We got a chance to visit several towns on our “Shadow of the Smokies Tour” SW of Asheville. I was particularly impressed with Waynesville, NC (population 9,232) which had vibrant downtown with over a dozen galleries and art studios. The town does an “Art After Dark” stroll of the galleries on the first Friday of each month from May to December. They also had great visitor kiosks scattered around, another neat idea.

Five miles from Waynesville is Cold Mountain which inspired Charles Frazier’s novel of the same name.

Our next stop was Dillsboro, where I tried to talk Betinha into going on the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad. This railroad was used for the famous train wreck in The Fugitive. In that scene a prison bus carrying Richard Kimbel (Harrison Ford) runs off the road and lands in the path of an oncoming freight train. The 60-second train wreck scene took ten weeks to plan, four days to shoot and fortunately only one take.

Here’s how they did that scene. They laid a separate set of tracks next to the existing tracks so that the seemingly derailed train kept going in the same direction. They covered them with dirt to create the derailment illusion. It took 16 cameras to capture the pushing of the bus over 400 feet along the tracks. After shooting they searched for one camera for eight hours finally finding it under 26 feet of dirt. If you go on the railroad, you can see the remains of the locomotive used in the wreck about two miles out of town.