The Wrecker is a 1929 British-German silent film that tells the story of a crook who organizes train crashes to discredit the railway, in favor of a rival bus company. A highlight of the film is a train crash scene filmed at Herriard on the Basingstoke and Alton Light Railway. South Eastern and Chatham Railway F1 Class locomotive No. A148 and a set of coaches were released on an incline to collide into a Foden steam lorry. The impact, which destroyed the locomotive and the lorry, was recorded by 22 cameras. The stunts in this film were groundbreaking for 1920s British cinema A scene which has been described as “the most spectacular railway crash in cinema history.”
Other than the crash, the film is otherwise undistinguished. The Wrecker was co-produced by Michael Balcon and Arnold Pressburger and directed by a Hungarian, Géza von Bolváry who made the majority of his films in Germany and Austria, even under Nazism. The Wrecker would also form the basis of an American B picture, The Phantom Express (1932).
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