Winning the lottery?

Well, sort of. Two new lottery commercials were filmed in Snoqualmie, and one of them featured a locomotive from the Northwest Railway Museum’s Collection.  So for several local businesses, a church and the Museum it was sort of like winning a small prize in the lottery.

A film crew sets up the interior shot of “Jim” operating his locomotive.

The Museum hosted the Washington State Lottery and their film production partners on a recent warm and sunny day.  (Those days have not been plentiful this year, but that is another story.)

The commercial filmed at the Museum features “Jim,” a character who wins the lottery and upgrades his HO scale locomotive to a full-size model.  Of course, the real locomotive happens to be the Museum’s locomotive 201, a model RSD-4 built by the American Locomotive Company in 1951 for Kennecott Copper.  This 1,600 HP locomotive is similar to the once ubiquitous ALCO road switchers that operated on more than a dozen railroads in the Northwest.  The bright orange behemoth was pulled by one of the Museum’s Baldwin RS4TC locomotives, which was “removed” from the film in post-production.  An actor sat in the engineer’s seat pretending to operate it.  A home and garage were also added in during the post-production process.

Locomotive 4012 pushed and pulled the 201 but was rendered invisible during post-production.

Thanks go out to the many Museum volunteers that met or exceeded the client’s expectations and made it all come together for a clever and amusing ad.

The commercial is now running on local television; watch for it!