Trivia / Wagon Train

• Channel Hop: From NBC for the first five seasons, to ABC for the last three. It also switched channels in Britain, moving from ITV to The BBC.
• Dawson Casting: Diane Jergens, 23 or 24, played sixteen-year-old Prudence in "The Steele Family."
• Died During Production: Series star Ward Bond unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1961, necessitating a change to John McIntyre as the new lead. Interestingly, no episode actually deals with Maj. Adams' (Bond's character) leaving/retiring/dying, and so the next episode is McIntyre's character taking over from a tyrannical replacement played by Lee Marvin.
• Recycled Script: "Alias Bill Hawks" is basically Joe Dakota with the serial numbers helpfully filed off by the screenwriter who did both.
• Real-Life Relative: John McIntire's children Holly and Tim McIntire guest starred as siblings Holly and Dave Bleecker in "The Bleeker Story".
• What Could Have Been: Ah Chong in "The Ah Chong Story" was originally going to be played by Bachelor Father's Sammee Tong, but NBC disliked cast members of its shows appearing on competing networks. So the role went to the decidedly Caucasian Arnold Stang. Oh, dear. Especially since Yellowface had been averted for the earlier episode "The Sakae Ito Story", with Sakae Ito played by Sessue Hayakawa.

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