Old movies and especially cartoons love to show people tied to railways. Was this a legitimate thing or something made up by storytellers?
The first use of it in a film was in Barney Oldfield's Race for a Life, a 1913 Mack Sennet comedy featuring the Keystone Cops ( apparently it never was one of the series The Perils of Pauline). You can actually watch that over on the Internet Archive here.
However, the railway-rescue device predates films by several decades, being part of a melodrama in an American theater in 1863, titled ( appropriately) The Engineer. It was immediately very popular, getting written into more shows and spreading to other theaters in the US, England and France. And why not: it had all the elements required of Victorian melodrama- heroines in peril, valiant heroes, perfidious villains, gallant rescues and fun lights, sounds and big stage effects . By the time Sennett used it, it had become cliché: which is likely why he put it into a comedy.
Nicholas Daly : Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Drama, the Railway, and the Dark Face of Modernity in Victorian Studies, v.42 n.1, Indiana University Press
Hi, you'll find additional responses in these threads
/u/leyebrow in Do we know of anyone actually being tied up and left on the railroad tracks?
/u/AshkenazeeYankee in Did criminals from the West in the 19th century actually tie women to train tracks or is this just a trope from tv shows and cartoons?
/u/Romiress in Back in the old west, were people actually tied to train tracks, or is this concept just created by Hollywood?
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