Rock Island Trail is centered on the building of a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River.

Forrest Tucker (as Reed Loomis) is the head honcho of the outfit in charge of building the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi River between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa in 1856. He must battle rival paddle wheel steamer and stagecoach lines to break their monopoly on transport.

An expansion storyline told with gusto, humour and the usual fictitious fun stuff interspersed throughout, which is conflicts in the form of shootouts, fistfights, ship ramming into the bridge setting it on fire, an Indian attack at the end and a mop fight (no joke!). It's lighthearted entertaining fare with Forest Tucker playing a hero for a change, and he does really well. Pity he didn't make more as a lead. I also liked the snappy dialogue and the song.

A rambunctious Western about Forrest Tucker pitting his Rock Island Line against the retrograde stagecoach or steamboat line run by Bruce Cabot, the heavy, who doesn't want the railroad cutting into his profits. Chill Wills is the earthy comic sidekick. Adele Mara is the girl the two principals fight over. She had the oddest eyes. My Dx? Thyrotoxic storm, secondary to an acute infraction of the myoculinary.

The writing is by James Edward Grant. His point of view was never very subtle. There tends to be a patriarchal leader and the others were followers, especially the women. He later went on to write for John Wayne's later Westerns because, as the Duke put it, "He knows how to write for me." The result was a string of turkeys, unfortunately, and the image of the unyielding Wayne that we've all come to love. When he spoke, it was like one of the faces on Mount Rushmore opening its mouth to utter some rocky platitude.

And either the writing or the editing leaves some events without explanation. I don't know why -- just before the climactic battle -- several stalled cars blow up. Is it good or bad that the bridge was destroyed? It's treated as good.

Here, Grant is given to more flowery dialog. When someone accounts for an incident, the listener comments, not "That's reasonable" or "That's possible," but "That's plausible." (Twice.) "Shall" is sometimes substituted for "will," willy nilly, so to speak. Sometimes it works. "Kirby has such a wealth of manners and such a poverty of ethics." "I grow repetitious in my spinsterhood." Not much attention is paid to the other elements of the film. R. Dale Butts did the music which, in one scene, is directly ripped off from "The Lieutenant Kije Suite." You won't hear the song, "Rock Island Line," and you shouldn't, because it was a prisoner's song in Arkansas and first recorded in 1934. Intead, you'll hear a terrible paean to the sights out West. Bruce Cabot and Roy Corey (as Abe Lincoln) may wear proper dress but everybody else looks like an ordinary cowboy in an ordinary Western. Weapons: ditto. The direction by Joseph Kane is pedestrian except that the climactic action scene aboard the train is handled well and there is some admirable stunt work.