Corkscrew Mountain

Corkscrew Mountain
Type	Mountain
Location	The Polar Express route
The Polar Express Route
Previous	Ice Lake
Next	Suspension Bridge

Corkscrew Mountain is a location in the film The Polar Express.

Role in the film

Corkscrew Mountain is one of the locations along the Polar Express' journey to the North Pole. It is a conical-shaped mountain with railroad tracks spiraling up it, giving it a corkscrew-like shape, hence its name. After reaching the top, the tracks start crossing a suspension bridge.

While the train goes up the mountain, Hero Boy, Hero Girl and the Conductor walk across the locomotive's tender to get back into the passenger cars. On the way, Hero Boy slips and almost falls off before the Conductor saves him. The Conductor then tells the children about the time he slipped and nearly fell off the train during his first time on the Polar Express.

The inspiration for Corkscrew Mountain in the book.

The mountain was inspired by a mountain the train appears climbing in the book, which describes it as being "so high it seemed as if we would scrape the moon." Unlike its film counterpart, it is not a corkscrew-like shape and the tracks loop around it only once.

Trivia

• As the train climbs up the mountain, the carriages bend like rubber to match the curvature of the track. This was to prevent them from clipping the mountain.
• Some promotional material for the film showing the mountain make the suspension bridge look shorter than it appears in the film itself.
• The name of the mountain is only revealed in The Art of the Polar Express.
• Corkscrew Mountain is the name of two real-life mountains, one near Caroline, Alberta in Canada and the other near Challis, Idaho. There is also a peak called Corkscrew Peak in the Grapevine Mountains in Death Valley National Park.