1953
Charles Crichton
A comical and delightful tale of community spirit, written by celebrated Ealing regular and Academy Award Winner T.E.B. Clarke (The Lavender Hill Mob, Barnacle Bill) and directed by Charles Crichton (A Fish Called Wanda, The Lavender Hill Mob).
Originally released in 1953, The Titfield Thunderbolt follows the consequences of when the Government-run, British Railways Service announce the closure of the line linking rural Titfield to Mallingford – the only line the Titfield inhabitants rely on to commute to work and transport their produce to market. A group of the local village residents make a bid to run it themselves, backed by a massively wealthy member of the community attracted to the complete lack of alcohol licensing hours on trains.
Unfortunately their decision puts them into direct competition with the local bus company and soon enough, a whole array of comically genius anarchy and madness ensues, including cunning sabotage and thrilling adventures.
Written By T.E.B Clarke
The 2026 restoration of The Titfield Thunderbolt began with the 4K pin-registered scanning of the original three-strip camera negative. The three strips had to have their colour separations combined to produce the final colour image. One of the biggest issues to overcome was aligning the colour separations together, initially an automated process, but also requiring a huge amount of manual tweaking and tracking. Film scanning, colour grading and restoration were completed by Silver Salt Restoration, who dedicated over 500 hours to manually clean and carefully remove sparkle, dirt and scratches, repair of missing frames, tears and correction of density fluctuation.
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