In Detroit, we have only about two Amtraks per day... And we have plenty of space, no need to pitch our tents on the tracks...

We have a lovely old train staion with a million wondows, now broken up as far as anybody can throw a rock, about a two-thords of a million.

Bangkok cooks. Motown waits. You can get a nice spot here, far and safe from the train. But we are just as ambitious as those kok bangers. Come and look. Come here. Safer than Bangkok, and closer, easier.

Developing Asia is fascinating, even in such cozy nooks of part-time squalor.

Having spent much of the past 20 years in Bangkok, I can assure that the video is fake.

If you look at it closely, you'll see that it is fake yourself. Look at the items along the right-hand side of the track and see how the trains appears to run them over. Some of them even wink in and out of existence beneath the train.

A very clever fake - I have no idea how they did it.

Bangkok is a wonderfully romantic foreign city, but space isn't such a premium there that anyone needs to play games like that with the train tracks.

Also note the narrow gauge on the ground - then observe where the wheels appear.

It's a damn good one, and whoever did it should get snapped up by Lucasfilm pronto. The reflections of the various market items in the aluminum side panels appear to correspond perfectly to the real world objects, which would be almost impossible to achieve without almost the entire scene being 3D. This is award-winning material that would take a team of artists and compositers in a VFX shop. I've worked in the industry and I can't say for sure.

Take a look at the second video. This actually a pretty famous market. But I do not believe it is in Bangkok. It is along a train line that goes to Bangkok but it is not in the city. I just read about this place a week or two ago, I will try and find out the rest of the info. There are Thailand travel blogs that talk about this place and others along this particular train line.

Here's a travelogue from early 2006:

http://www.richardbarrow.com/unseen-thailand/market-on-the-railway-tracks.html

complete with a link to a video taken from the train:

http://www.thailandvideoblogs.com/content/view/21/28/

OK, conspiracy theorists, find the same people wearing the same clothes, so we know all of these market shots were filmed the same day.

But WAIT! They'd know we'd look for that, so they probably had multiple casts of extras and/or multiple sets of clothes...

The place is Maeklong market at Samut Songkhram, about 65 km southwest of Bangkok.

Some notes on the railway line:

http://2bangkok.com/2bangkok/MassTransit/maeklong.shtml

More details by the same Richard Barrow whose page was posted by another reader: see

http://www.thai-blogs.com/index.php?blog=5&p=1136

I had never heard of this place or train before, but I am suitably intrigued now.