Movies Keeping Engineer’s Life on Track : Trains: A studio called in the 1960s seeking his vintage locomotive. Thirty-two films later, the 85-year-old still helps bring back the Old West.

The whole thing was like a fairy tale, Everett Rohrer says. The retired train engineer’s phone rang at midnight one Friday about 30 years ago and the man on the other end said he was from Columbia Pictures. He had a deal. Could they meet the next day?

“My dear wife--she was living then--thought it was a joke,” Rohrer, of Hudson, Colo., said of his start in the movie business.

But it was no joke. Columbia needed a vintage steam engine to make a Western called “Cat Ballou,” featuring an actress named Jane Fonda.

Would Rohrer fix up a locomotive and drive it in the movie, if Columbia lent him the money to buy it?

“I still get royalties on that picture,” Rohrer, now 85, said in an interview during a lunch break on the set of “A River Runs Through It,” a movie being directed in Montana this summer by Robert Redford.

The call from Columbia came 32 movies ago.

Now Rohrer can rattle off a list of famous and not-so-famous films that featured him and his 1907 Baldwin locomotive: “The Life of Pancho Villa,” “Alias Smith and Jones,” “Heaven’s Gate,” “The Cheyenne Social Club” and “The Disappearance of Sister Amy,” starring Jill Ireland and Bette Davis.

“Bette Davis was one of the nicest actresses I’ve ever worked with. I had my old greasy clothes on and she came and gave me a great big hug. She didn’t have to do that,” Rohrer said. “I thought she’d be tough as an old boot.”

A devout man who prays before every meal, Rohrer said Jimmy Stewart was the friendliest actor he ever worked with.

“I won’t tell you the orneriest one,” he said.

“A River Runs Through It,” is the second movie Rohrer has worked this summer in Montana. He and his train will also appear in a Ron Howard movie, tentatively named “The Irish Story,” being filmed in Billings, 140 miles to the east.

While idling his engine between takes on the Redford set, somebody brought Rohrer an envelope of photographs showing him shaking hands with actor Tom Cruise in front of the engine. Cruise is starring in “A River Runs Through It.”

Film work has taken Rohrer and his train all over the Western United States, Canada and Mexico, said Rohrer’s son-in-law John Pickar, who, as fireman for the engine, spends long days shoveling coal into the boiler.

The temperature in the cab, really just a small platform and two seats wedged beside a huge boiler, gets extremely high. Rohrer said the heat doesn’t bother him much after 60 years of railroading.

Over the years, Rohrer has accumulated a caboose, baggage cars and a handful of vintage passenger cars to go with the train. When it’s not being filmed, he stores the train on a piece of track he leases in Colorado.

He said a Texas oilman has been trying to buy his train for years and had hiked his offer to $500,000. Rohrer declined.

Rohrer also keeps a warehouse full of spare parts, including four cowcatchers, 21 whistles and a dozen headlights that he can attach to make the engine look like an authentic model built anywhere between 1870 and 1940.

Rohrer started working trains as a fireman for the Missouri Pacific line when he was 18 years old.

“I shoveled enough coal to sink the Queen Mary,” he said.

By the time he was 23, he had become an engineer, and he has been driving trains ever since.