ACCURACY RIDES HOLLYWOOD'S RAILS.

Perhaps it's OK for the stars of White Christmas to ride from Florida to Vermont on the Southern Pacific.

Documenting the civil rights era might call for something more truthful.

Production crews from Kapital Entertainment of Los Angeles are working this week in north Mississippi to recreate an Illinois Central passenger train that will play a key role in “Women of the Movement,” an ABC-TV series expected to air later this year. The circa-1950 passenger train consists of three pieces of former Iowa Pacific Holdings equipment — an E9A passenger locomotive and two cars — and two cars from northern Ohio rail preservation groups.

The locomotive and cars were brought together Friday morning at an industrial park spur near Winona, Miss. According to local officials, the equipment will represent Illinois Central Railroad passenger trains which carried 14-year-old Emmitt Till from his suburban Chicago home to visit relatives in Money, Miss., where he was murdered, and another which Till’s casket from Mississippi back to Chicago.

The train scenes will be recorded on Grenada Railroad metals, which is to say, on the stretch of former Illinois Central trackage where Casey Jones's fatal collision occurred.

The use of the real railroads to set the scene in a movie with a civil rights theme is nothing new.  The 1967 In the Heat of the Night begins with a passenger getting off a Gulf Mobile and Ohio train.  In 1967, that railroad no longer offered passenger service south of St. Louis, and the train scenes were filmed in and around Sparta, Illinois, on freight-only lines of the carrier.