Filmed Locally - The Hold-up Of The Rocky Mountain Express

DELAWARE & ULSTER COUNTIES — The Hold-up Of The Rocky Mountain Express is a 1906 silent short film not shot in the Rocky Mountains at all but in the Catskills on the old Ulster and Delaware line from Phoenicia to Kaaterskill. Released three years after Edwin Porter's classic of early cinema, The Great Train Robbery, there is little plot to describe. Most of the film includes exterior shots moving along the railroad tracks. We see the train station in Phoenicia and a snaking path up through the Catskills. "The path of the railroad that was used in the 1906 film went from Phoenicia through Stony Clove along Route 214," explains Bob Gildersleeve of The Mountaintop Historical Society. "Most of the action takes place South of Stony Clove Notch and looks to me to move North until before the lake and campground at the narrowest section of the notch between Hunter Mountain on the West and Plateau Mountain on the East."

The only interior shots are hardly worth mentioning. A set intended to be the inside of a train car carries passengers who mock and jeer at the demeaning treatment of an African-American porter before the train is held up and they are robbed, making it hard not to root for the criminals as they lighten the passenger's loads. The film's value is in its exterior footage, which offers a glimpse of a now-extinct section of the railroad. In its heyday, the Ulster and Delaware (U&D) spanned six counties and was dubbed "The Only All Rail Route Through the Catskills." Locals nicknamed it "the Up and Down" for the steep terrain it traversed through the Catskills. 

The culminating scene in which the train robbers are apprehended takes place along the tracks in Stony Clove, with a visible structure in the shot. "Looking at another photo in John Ham's book [Light Rails and Short Ties Through the Notch], the structure was just North of the narrowest part of the notch but still in Stony Clove," says Gildersleeve, who cites Ham's book as well as Michael Kudish's Where Did the Tracks go in the Catskills? as invaluable resources. For those interested in exploring parts of the old rail line, The Mountaintop Historical Society will have a hike led by Paul LaPierre on October 5th along parts of the tracks north of Stony Clove, just beyond the section captured by The Hold-up of The Rocky Mountain Express. For more information, visit https://mths.org/event/kaaterskill-junction-hike-with-paul-lapierre/. The Hold-up of The Rocky Mountain Express is in the public domain and readily available online.