The series is set in the late 19th century, featuring the adventures of railroad engineer Casey Jones and the crew of the Cannonball Express steam locomotive, fireman Wallie Sims and conductor Redrock Smith, working for the Midwest and Central Railroad. Casey lived in the fictional Missouri town of Midvale, within commuting distance of St. Louis, with his wife, Alice, their young son, Casey, Jr., and their dog Cinders. Although there really was a famous locomotive engineer named Casey Jones of the Illinois Central Railroad, the television series is only loosely based on him. However, it uses the real names of his train, the Cannonball Express. The name of the character Wallie Sims is a conflation of Illinois Central employee Wallace Saunders, who wrote the earliest version of "The Ballad of Casey Jones," and the real Jones' fireman, Simeon "Sim" Webb. Unlike Wallie Sims, both Saunders and Webb were black. Kenneth Gamet, the producer of Casey Jones, offers a gentler Western series against the more violent adult shows of the time. Casey Jones features the same classical types of plots as other westerns such as train robbers and vandals, but the episodes center as much on Casey's interaction with his family, particularly Casey, Jr.
Commissioned by Los Angeles television station KTTV, it was shot on a special set at Ray "Crash" Corrigan's studio Corriganville in the Simi Valley, California. Shot for one season, in part because of Alan Hale's commitment to filming episodes of Rory Calhoun's The Texan, the series ran for 32 half-hour black-and-white episodes. Its theme song was a version of the "Ballad of Casey Jones". The regular version of the opening titles features Alan Hale with Bobby Clark in the cab and credits Mary Lawrence, but the inclusion of Cinders is inconsistent. A reversed image is used in a close up of the Cannonball and the nameplate can be seen as reversed behind the show title. There are alternate versions of the closing credits. Both feature Alan Hale and Bobby Clark waving from the cab, the second features different shots of the Cannonball, including one of it passing over a trestle and the brow of a hill, and a different version of the song with slight amendments to the lyrics. Alan Hale filmed an introduction to the first episode on set with Bobby Clark where he introduced the new series to the audience. The locomotive used in location footage was Sierra No. 3, which was also used in many other television shows and films.
Episode list
Broadcast
According to issues of the UK Radio Times magazine, the series was shown in the UK on BBC1, the first run commencing on 8 November 1967, with a second run from 21 March 1969. Both runs showed only 26 episodes of the series. The last screening of an episode by the BBC was in August 1975.
