Where is Hell on Wheels filmed? The railroad town took four months to build — and a real river wiped it out in 2013
AMC's railroad Western built a working frontier town in southern Alberta and then watched a river take it apart. Here's where the series actually shot across five seasons, and what one morning in June 2013 cost the production.
Everything you see in Hell on Wheels is Alberta, roughly 1,500 miles north of where the show says it is. The Nebraska plains, the Wyoming badlands, the Sierra Nevada — all of it shot within about an hour of downtown Calgary.
The series ran on AMC from 2011 to 2016, five seasons and 57 episodes, created by Joe and Tony Gayton, with Anson Mount as Cullen Bohannon, Common as Elam Ferguson and Colm Meaney as Thomas Durant. It was produced by Entertainment One and Nomadic Pictures, and it became the largest single-project spend in Alberta film history: $ 255 million over six years, according to Nomadic co-chairman Chad Oakes.
The Alberta setup
The show's whole conceit is a town that moves, which meant building a town that could be built again. The main set took four months to construct. Season 1 worked out of Calgary and the T'suu T'ina Nation reserve in southern Alberta for exteriors. Season 2 moved to the Bow River for exteriors with interiors in a building near the Calgary airport, budgeting roughly 80 shooting days for ten episodes. Production also worked along the Highwood River, which is where the trouble came from.
Executive producer Michael Rosenberg gave the Globe and Mail the pitch for staying put.
"You don't get this sky anywhere else. You don't get the authenticity of the cowboy culture anywhere else," Rosenberg said in 2015.
June 20, 2013
The 2013 Alberta floods put the set inside a mandatory evacuation zone. Production assistants were standing at the riverbank with measuring sticks while crews kept shooting, halfway through episode 6 of season 3. AMC announced a two-day shutdown. The access road went under, and the two days became the season's scheduled hiatus, started early.
Read more: What happens to Eva in Hell on Wheels — the show that buried half its cast wrote her a different exit
Oakes described the evacuation to the Globe and Mail in 2015: 15 cast members, 100 extras and 160 crew off the site in 30 minutes.
"I remember standing up above the Highwood, watching 60-foot trees float past me like toothpicks," Oakes said.
The town set did not survive it.
What the recovery cost
The production gave up its break. Oakes called the stretch that followed "a true defining moment," with cast and crew working "around the clock, seven days a week" to claw back the lost days — with the season, and arguably the series, riding on whether they made the delivery dates. Season 3 aired on schedule from August 10 to October 5, 2013.
Where the last two seasons went
- Season 4 — 13 episodes shot along the Bow River, April 24 to September 24, 2014.
- Season 5 — CL Ranch at Jumping Pound Creek, west of Calgary, standing in for Truckee, California and Laramie, Wyoming.
- Kananaskis Country — the provincial park system about 40 miles west of the ranch, doubling for the Sierra Nevada the Central Pacific had to tunnel through.
- Alberta weather — a permanent production variable. Anson Mount's summary: "The weather is another character in this show. We don't know what to expect. But we roll with it."
For the record: at its peak the show employed over 200 crew, aired in 188 countries, and drew close to four million weekly viewers in the United States. The river cost it about a week.
Earlier we wrote: Where is Deadliest Catch filmed? The tiny Alaskan town behind it happens to be America's #1 fishing port