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Author: Forget

The 93 International Train Robbery: Moscow Operation, which will be released during the National Day in 2023, is based on the real event in 1993 when our public security department sent people to Russia to hunt down the robbery gang that robbed the K3 international train. Interested readers can search for relevant reportage on their own to learn the ins and outs of the incident. As a light and shadow art, movies must come from life and be higher than life, and related artistic processing is indispensable. From the perspective of the viewing experience, the film has a compact plot, exciting scenes, proper character portrayal and rhythm, and is considered a good police and gangster film.

There are many exciting scenes in "The Great Train Robbery 93: Moscow Operation", and there is even a thrilling scene of blocking the Su-27 from taking off. However, due to my profession, I am most concerned about the four fighting scenes that took place on the train, on the trackside, and in the wheel changing workshop. From a professional perspective, the film has many highlights related to trains, but also many flaws. This is not to nitpick a commercial film that is both real and fake, but to take this opportunity to popularize railway common sense. In particular, some operations that are completely unworkable in the eyes of railway experts should not be imitated in real life even if you are in a hurry.

The train body in the film has six reinforcing ribs on the outer wall, but the window frames are made of aluminum alloy, and only the upper half of the windows are openable, which is a typical external feature of the early-production 25B passenger car. This was the most advanced and high-end passenger car owned by China Railway in the early 1990s. The K3/4 Beijing-Moscow international train uses this type of car, and there is nothing wrong with it.

As an international train, the passenger car has a Chinese currency hanging on the outer wall. The train direction sign (the black-lettered sign with a white background hanging on the outer wall in the middle of the car body indicating the train number, departure station and destination station) is marked with Chinese and Russian characters, which is in line with the facts.

The film features various details on the train, from the longitudinal ventilation vents under the wall panels of each private room in the soft sleeper car, to the bookshelf on the corridor wall, from the flap locks to the two height lines for children's tickets painted on the wall near the end door of the car at the vehicle access platform.

From the passenger car model and number markings sprayed on the outer wall of the car body near the door, to the vehicle ownership information sprayed on the outer wall of the car body (the train vehicles in the film are marked with "Beijing Bureau Beijing Section", which means that these vehicles are assets of the Beijing Railway Bureau Beijing Depot), from the serial number plate embedded in the upper side of the door (a white plate with red letters indicating which car number it is), to the broadcasting lines between the cars, everything is so real, which shows that the railway department provided a train that is old but well-maintained for the crew to use for filming.

The only omission is that in the early 1990s, the carriage numbers of China Railway passenger cars were all five digits, and it was not until 2004 that they were upgraded to six digits. Of course, this is of no concern.

Perhaps some sharp-eyed viewers will be a little confused as to why the style of the dining car in the film is somewhat different from the trains we take in our daily lives, especially the aisle between the two rows of dining tables, which is obviously much wider. And if you look closely, you will find that the dining car service staff include not only white people, but also yellow people with Central Asian features. The meals served are simple Western food, and the tableware is knives and forks, with no chopsticks to be seen at all.

These details are all true. Because this is a cross-border train, catering involves food transit issues, which is very troublesome. Therefore, when the K3/4 international train runs in China, the Chinese dining car is hung in the middle of the train; when it runs in Mongolia, it is hung with the dining car of the Mongolian Railway Department; after entering Russia, it is changed to a Russian dining car. As a pastoral and mineral country, Mongolia does not have a decent manufacturing industry in the country, and all equipment of its railway department is imported from the Soviet Union. The scenes about dining cars in the film all take place when the train is traveling in Russia, so it is reasonable for the audience to see Russian-style dining cars and Russian catering service staff.

Of course, there are also unreasonable scenes. For example, in the scene at the beginning of the film that reflects the robbery, several passengers rolled out of the train window in this position, which was 100% certain to cause serious injuries or even death on the spot. In history, during the train robbery that shocked China and Russia between May 26 and 31, 1993, there were passengers who jumped out of the train and were chased by the robbers, but that happened when the train was obviously slowing down, and the passengers who jumped out of the train were all injured without exception, so they could not escape the robbers' pursuit.

The correct posture is used by the robbers in the film when they jump out of the window to chase the passengers who jump out of the train. Because when jumping down in this posture, the body is controllable, and after the feet touch the ground, the legs can be quickly alternated, and the shoulders can be quickly rushed down the slope, thus reducing the momentum of falling and protecting oneself from injury.

Of course, to do this, you need not only courage but also practical training. However, in the film, there are overhead wire poles on the roadside. If you jump out of the train without slowing down, your body will continue to move in the direction of the train, so there is a risk of hitting the overhead wire poles after jumping out of the train, which may result in death or serious injury. Therefore, non-professionals should not imitate this.

The robbers in the film were very professional. They knew how to pull the emergency brake valve in the carriage to stop the entire train so that they could pick up their accomplices and get back on the train.

This can also perfectly explain why the female robber in the carriage can appear in the locomotive cab and threaten the driver with a gun. Because the locomotive and the train carriage are not connected, she can only get off the train and walk along the roadbed to the front of the train to board the locomotive after the train stops due to emergency braking. However, even electric locomotives have two drivers, the chief and the deputy. Only the chief driver sitting in the driver's seat appears in the film. The reasonable explanation is that the female robber shot the deputy driver dead with a gun when boarding the locomotive, or kicked him off the train.

It should be pointed out that after the train stops under emergency braking, if you want to restart it, you must pry open the metal floor drain on the floor in the middle of the carriage, reach out and hold the pull ring inside and pull it up to open the relief valve. This is the job of the train attendant (called "train inspector" in the industry). If there is no former professional among the robbers, they have to use force to force the train inspector to do this. Shortly after the train stops, the robbers open the door and let the accomplices who got off the train to rob and injure people get on the train quickly. This job is theoretically feasible, but the people on the train have to lift up the flap at the door of the train to reveal the three steps below. The people on the train have to chase in the direction of the train, reach out and grab the handrail at the door of the train, and then push the ground hard with their feet until their feet land on the steps. Like in the movie, without putting up the flap or grabbing the handrail first, he just rushed over and jumped onto the car like a rocket. Only the legendary "Swallow Li San" who can "fly over eaves and walls as if walking on flat ground" could do that.

After the robbery, some people were selling the stolen goods in the railway marshaling yard. The ground was filled with neatly stacked brake shoe chisels tied with wire, as well as piles of new and old brake shoes. The scene was very realistic and should have been filmed in a real railway marshaling yard. In the 1990s, theft of railway goods was very serious, and it was not uncommon for robbers to trade on the spot in the marshaling yard.

Zhang Hanyu plays Captain Cui of the Criminal Investigation Team of the Beijing Railway Bureau Public Security Bureau, who chases the suspect on a motorcycle in the marshaling yard and uses his familiarity with the terrain to successfully throw the suspect into the middle of the road. But at this moment, a freight train is coming at high speed. Even if Zhang Hanyu and the suspect are both lying in the middle of the road, they will still be killed immediately in reality.

This is because the front of the locomotive is designed with a cowplow near the rails. The bottom of the cowplow is very close to the rail surface, otherwise it cannot clear the foreign objects on the rail surface and the track center that may pose a threat to the train operation. The thickness of an adult's body is obviously greater than the vertical distance from the bottom of the cowplow to the lowest point of the track center, so Zhang Hanyu and the suspect are doomed to die.

If the face is not tightly attached to the heart of Tao like this, there is no hope of survival.

Zhang Hanyu led a team of four people on the K3 train to Moscow and encountered robbers. Please note that when the robbers blocked Sun Jiandong in the soft sleeper compartment, please note that the side sliding door was only closed about two-thirds.

In this case, no matter how much impact it receives, it is impossible to knock the door completely off the mounting track without tearing the wall panel.

Moreover, the knocked-down door panel will never smash the window glass. Because the railway windows are all made of tempered glass, the impact resistance is several orders of magnitude higher than that of ordinary glass. Even if it is hit by an impact force that exceeds its own endurance limit, it will not be immediately shattered as in the film. Although it has broken, the fragments are connected together and will not separate easily. Even if small pieces of debris fly away, the edges of the fragments are much more rounded and blunt than those of ordinary glass fragments, and it is not easy to cut people and cause secondary injuries. Such scenes in the film can only have such an effect if the glass props are made of sugar.

Sun Jianjun was knocked down and lay on the door panel to resist the robbers' subsequent attacks. The frenzied robbers tried to push Sun Jianjun out of the car with the door panel. Sun Jianjun, unable to gain leverage, dove to the side and grabbed another car window more than 3 meters away in a split second to survive. This is completely impossible in reality. Please cherish your life and do not imitate.

Near the end of the film, the K4 train on its return journey was towed into a wheel-changing garage in Mongolia for wheel-changing operations before entering China. If the wheels were changed on the Chinese side, all passengers would be asked to get off the train to rest and wait until the wheels were changed before boarding the train. This is because, as shown in the film, the wheelset replacement operation must be carried out by unhooking each carriage of the train, and after removing the various power lines and communication lines connecting the vehicles, the car body must be lifted up with a car pick, and the center plate pin must be separated from the lower center plate of the bogie before the bogie can be pushed out along the track. In this process, the car body will inevitably tilt, posing a certain threat to the personal safety of passengers. The hot water cup placed on the coffee table may also cause the hot water to spill out due to the tilt of the car body, scalding the passengers. In addition, during the lifting process of the car pick, there is also the possibility that the pick head will get stuck or suddenly fall due to the gear rack being disengaged, which will cause the car body to be unbalanced. For safety reasons, the Chinese railway department will definitely let the passengers get off the train before carrying out wheel-changing operations.

However, the film explains that the wheel-changing operation was carried out on the Mongolian side. According to the author's understanding, the safety regulations of the country's railways are far less strict than those of China's railways, so it is reasonable to leave passengers on the train to carry out wheel-changing operations. Moreover, according to the regulations of China's railways, for safety reasons, the car-lifting pick cannot support the car body for a long time, and the car body must be lifted up with iron horses (that is, the yellow iron racks that appear in the film). However, the top area of ​​the iron horse is small, and the manufacturing tolerance of the four iron horses of the car-lifting must be considered. Therefore, China's railways also stipulate that when using iron horses to lift the car, a piece of abandoned sleeper must be placed between the iron horse and the bottom support beam of the car body, which can not only increase the contact area between the two, but also use the compressibility of the sleeper to compensate for the height difference between the iron horses. However, this technical measure was not taken in the film.

When the robbers rushed into the garage, Zhang Hanyu and others took the handcuffed Huang Xuan to hide on the roof of the car, which was impossible because the five people had to climb up to the roof along the steps welded on the outer wall of the car, and it was impossible not to be discovered by the robbers who were outnumbered.

The long guns in the hands of the robbers were all domestically produced Type 56 submachine guns. Its distinguishing feature is that the front sight wing is fully covered, which is unique among the countless AK47 derivatives in the world.

Whether the robbers could get the Type 56 submachine gun in Russia and Mongolia is debatable. However, in the final confrontation, the plainclothes police officers held the captured Type 56 submachine guns in the correct posture, but the large paddle speed selector on the right side of the receiver was in the top "safety" position, which is unreasonable.

The pistol Zhang Hanyu used in the final gunfight actually had no adjustable sight, and the adjustable sight shaft mount on the top of the slide looked very abrupt. Considering that they did not bring a gun when they went abroad, this gun was stolen from the robbers. Robbers use whatever weapons they can get and do not care about accuracy, which is understandable. But this will test Zhang Hanyu's rough shooting skills.

(The author of this article: Wang Qing, a member of the "This is War" affiliated author. Reprinting is prohibited without the permission of the author and "This is War". Violators will be held accountable for legal liability.

Editor's Profile: Wang Zhengxing, a former officer of a field force of the People's Liberation Army, has served in infantry units, headquarters, logistics departments and other units. He is committed to the study of war history and tactics, and has a unique understanding of military tactics and non-war operations. His book "This is War" was recommended in two episodes of Phoenix TV's "Open Book for Eight Minutes" column in May and June 2014. His public account is also called "This is War", welcome to follow)