Fixing the main problem with Snowpiercer

Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer is not the type of movie designed to withstand scrutiny. If you are going to go with it, you just have to stifle the many nitpicky inquiries that come to mind. Any question that starts with "How would they ...?" or "How could they ...?" is probably not going to have a satisfactory answer.

However, after watching one episode of the TV adaptation of this movie, I am satisfied that they've at least addressed my biggest qualm.

I don't see any mention in the Wikipedia plot description of the number of train cars in Bong's film, but if my memory of the movie serves me correctly, there were shots where you could see the entire train. That meant a vehicle with maybe 50 cars, a hundred cars max. 

If you break that down, it just doesn't work. Given that the "tail" has at least five cars, and that there's a large buffer zone between the "tailies" and the upper class twits who eat sushi and go to the spa, that could leave only 30 or so cars for those upper crust types. Given the sheer number of individual cars we see that aren't sleeping quarters -- dining cars, aquariums, arboretums, spas, dance clubs -- you are left with only a small number of cars where these people could actually get some privacy. And the supposition is that private quarters would probably hold a lot more value for these people than the ability to go to the spa.

Snowpiercer the TV show takes care of that from the start. In the opening monologue by star Daveed Diggs, he describes the train as having 1,001 cars.

That's more like it. 

When you are dealing with a behemoth of that size, you aren't going to spend much time worrying about what goes where. I don't yet know the total population of this show's train -- I assume it will come up in ensuing episodes -- but even if there are as many as 400 fancy rich people on board, they could each get their own car and still leave hundreds of cars left over that could be devoted to the excesses of the 1%. And I guess because of how trains work, the excessive length of the vehicle has little to do with how nimbly it can travel through mountain passes and over long bridges over water. 

While this is a satisfying correction to the source material, I am still left with at least two big questions, and will wait to see how the show deals with them.

1) At the speed this train is evidently traveling, how can it only circumnavigate the globe once in a year's time? My feeling is that it would take at most a month to make the trip.

2) After 16 years inside this train, how is everyone wearing what still looks to be new clothing? Do they really have the resources to switch out everyone's wardrobe enough for everything to seem very new and in vogue?

Of course, if I wanted to, I could keep listing nitpicky questions that would number more than 20 before I knew it.

Let's just see if the show is good enough to make me stifle them.