The Brave Engineer

The Brave Engineer is a 1950 Walt Disney-produced short subject cartoon, based on the exploits of legendary railroad engineer John Luther "Casey" Jones. It is narrated by comic Jerry Colonna and is a fanciful re-telling of the story related in the Wallace Saunders ballad, later made famous by Eddie Newton and T. Lawrence Seibert.

The film opens with an overhead shot of a sprawling railroad yard in the morning, where all the trains are "fast asleep". The shot begins to focus on a single train with Engine No. 2, an American Standard 4-4-0, which is Casey's, whose engine, of course, is "slow asleep," and eventually cuts to a closeup of the engine's cab window, where Casey is revealed to be sleeping in his engine cab.

Doffing his bedclothes, he checks his watch and, realizing that he is fully behind schedule, hurriedly readies the engine to depart. Mail is loaded aboard the mail car on the train and with a toot on the engine's whistle, Casey sets off at a dangerously high speed through the maze of switches and sidings, nearly T-boning two other trains in the process before making it safely out of the yard.

At first, the trip remains uneventful. Further on, however, the weather becomes nasty, flooding the tracks like "the bed of a creek" and all but swamping the entire train. Eight hours late, but nonetheless undaunted, Casey climbs up onto the engine's cab roof and uses his coal shovel as a paddle. Before long, when the flood has cleared, Casey is on his way again.

No sooner has the train been back up to full speed, though, than Casey is forced to bring it screeching to a halt: standing in the middle of the tracks grazing nearby, is a large brown cow being forced to move aside after much shouting and whistle blowing on Casey's part. As the cow clears, Casey starts shovelling the coal into the engine's furnace while realizing he is late.

Unfortunately, a new problem presents itself. A stereotypical villain with a black handlebar mustache has tied a lady to the tracks in front of Casey's train. Unwilling to waste any more time stopping, Casey rushes forward, stands on the engine's cowcatcher, and scoops up the terrified woman just seconds in the moment in which the train is about to run her over. Casey is in such a hurry now, that he doesn't have time to even stop to let her off, depositing her (rope and all) in the arms of a pleasantly surprised stationmaster as he rushes past the next platform at full speed.

Hours later, nightfall has come and Casey's engine is found steaming full-bore through a narrow, snow-covered mountain pass. As the train passes over a high trestle spanning a gorge however while Casey is stoking the engine's boiler and blowing into the engine's firebox to make the train go faster, another stereotypical villain who "does not appear on the level" nearly brings things to an explosive end. Once again undaunted by a seemingly impassable obstacle, Casey's engine struggles, huffing and puffing, up the side of the gorge and continues on its way again.

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Wikipedia