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!