The ones flat against the ground that have been packed down by trains driving over them? I don’t think you can usually get under those.
EDIT: I found a few pictures where the ropes do go underneath them - so now the question is, why are people not depicted that way 99% of the time? They’re just laid onto the tracks in a way that it would be easy to get out of the way.
Because for the pacing of the scene, “wrapped with ropes” is movie shorthand for “immobilized.” Most of the time, most of the audience doesn’t really care about the details of the knots.
A bit more practical would be looping the rope under the track itself between the ties; especially if you found a viaduct or something where there is no ballast you could just loop the rope right under.
I doubt every track is easy to find spots to do that. Snidely Whiplash would have to go out and survey all the tracks to find ideal spots, or dig holes ahead of time. That’s a lot of trouble when he could just shoot them instead!
It’s to the wooden whatchamacallits orthogonal to the rails
The ones flat against the ground that have been packed down by trains driving over them? I don’t think you can usually get under those.
EDIT: I found a few pictures where the ropes do go underneath them - so now the question is, why are people not depicted that way 99% of the time? They’re just laid onto the tracks in a way that it would be easy to get out of the way.
Because for the pacing of the scene, “wrapped with ropes” is movie shorthand for “immobilized.” Most of the time, most of the audience doesn’t really care about the details of the knots.
I think it’s also because tying someone up that way is wildly impractical. The fact that nobody wants to show it the proper way is evidence of that.
A bit more practical would be looping the rope under the track itself between the ties; especially if you found a viaduct or something where there is no ballast you could just loop the rope right under.
I doubt every track is easy to find spots to do that. Snidely Whiplash would have to go out and survey all the tracks to find ideal spots, or dig holes ahead of time. That’s a lot of trouble when he could just shoot them instead!
Snidely Whiplash only needs to find a bridge, preferably one over a large ravine.
Then he just has to tie the hostage to the center of the bridge. Then when the hero makes a daring rescue Snidely can blow up the bridge.
And, like I said, the bridge won’t have ballast so you don’t have to dig out around the rails to tie Pettycoat McVictim town in the first place.
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Ties. Those are called railroad ties.