James Bond Trades Aston Martin for Cat Excavator

Both Cat machine fans and action movie aficionados alike might enjoy an exciting new website: www.catskyfall.com. It was created as a collaboration between Caterpillar and the producers of Skyfall—the latest James Bond film—and contains enough near-misses, reportable incidents, and outright disasters to make any safety supervisor picture mile-high piles of forms and the inevitable lawsuits that would accompany the extreme misuse of Caterpillar equipment depicted in the film if it were to somehow occur in real life.

The centerpiece of the mini-site is a clip from Skyfall in which iconic superspy James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) operates a 320D excavator atop a moving flatcar. As the train travels down the tracks, Bond rolls the excavator over several cars and smashes through the roof of the adjoining passenger railcar. Bond’s ally rides alongside the train and watches his next pulse-pounding move: leaving the cab unattended to walk across the extended boom and stick in order to jump into the car he damaged.

In addition to the action-packed clip form the film, the Caterpillar/Skyfall site is packed with photos. All joking aside, safety on the set was considered THE foremost concern, and numerous pictures of the film and safety crews on the set attest to the difficulty of filming these kind of high-energy scenes. But the results are worth it: we can all agree that Skyfall depicts one of the most exciting—and foolhardy—uses of Cat equipment ever committed to film!