Revisiting this thread after a while: and not about an actual error, just a perceived extreme improbability. Perhaps indicating that I have too much time on my hands...
This post concerns the film The Train (wretchedly lame title, Ive always thought), 1964, director John Frankenheimer. A highly acclaimed piece (including much steam rail material), set in the last days of the WW2 German occupation of France: dastardly high-up German military officer sets up looting of numerous art treasures from museum in Paris, and a special train to take them away into Germany the Resistance, and Burt Lancaster in particular, do everything they can to thwart his evil plan. The culminating sequence has the Resistance chaps after the train has gone a certain distance east, and night has fallen camouflaging things, chiefly by faking of station nameboards and other location-indicators, to fool the trains escort of German troops into thinking that they continue to travel further east into Germany; when in fact, the train has been diverted south and then north-west, and is heading back toward Paris.
My willing-suspension-of-belief capacity cannot cope with the above feat not even in order to enjoy an exciting adventure yarn. It is impossible for me to credit that not a single German on the train realised that something dodgy appeared to be happening, and thus caused the plug to be pulled. So many potential indicators, of many kinds (everything couldnt be camouflaged), even in a blacked-out wartime night, that they were in France not Germany especially for any German present, who had even slight railway knowledge: the signals would be wrong, the locos and stock encountered en route would be wrong, and presumably on double-track sections the train would perform French left-hand, not German right-hand, running.
All right, its a standard trope in WW2 action films, that Jerry is thick but I cant see him being that thick. I understand that as with most other armies of the period German soldiers were encouraged to use their initiative to a fair extent. Somebody would have smelt a rat -- informing his superior as appropriate -- and the brilliant scheme would have been stopped. Consulting Wiki informs me that though some elements of the film are based on fact; its mostly fiction, and certainly the changing direction and heading back home through mock-Germany part is fiction.
Wiki mentions that the film was intended originally to be a more thoughtful / psychological, less action smash em-and-shoot-em-up piece; but there were differences of opinion over this, and a change of director to Frankenheimer who seemingly was inclined to pull out all the stops and change the script in favour of exciting action, even if unlikely. Presumably, films ultimate makers saw the change direction and back homewards thing, as artistic licence: and figured that the great majority of folk in audiences wouldnt have a problem with it wouldnt know, or care, or both, enough about railway matters; to be bothered by the inherent great improbability. As touched on earlier in this thread: from the makers point of view, the tiny minority of viewers of the film who were railway nuts, and got upset by the perceived great unlikeliness of this episode; would, in the absence of this glaring nonsense element, gripe and nitpick about lesser stuff. At the very least, a few letters of complaint would be received anyway, about stuff such as that loco number 120H-123 was, as at 1944, allocated to Sainte-Merdre-Dans-La-Gidouille depot, so could not have been present -- as shown in the film -- at Connerie-sur-Égout: thus, to hell with all those loons, whether about matters big or little...