Caption: An early Canadian Pacific Railway 4-4-0 steams through the rough Rocky Mountain landscape out west, hauling two wooden passenger cars through mountainside wilderness cut through by steel rails laid over wooden trestles and through rock cuts, along the new transcontinental railway line spanning Canada from coast to coast.

That was the intent the CBC's film directors wanted to portray - a rocky, rough, sometimes treacherous, and vastly untamed mountain wilderness that the transcontinental railway line had to be built through in western Canada. And for that film crews (guided by technical consultants like Omer Lavallee) turned to the Carmi Sub in Myra Canyon (east of Penticton BC) for shooting various scenes for their 1974 film adaptation of Pierre Berton's "The National Dream" book on building the Canadian Pacific Railway.

For the live steam scenes, CPR 4-4-0 136 (double-billed as both 136 and 148 for different scenes) was borrowed from the Ontario Rail Association and backdated to a late 1800's appearance, and some vintage passenger and freight equipment was rounded up by CP from their work car fleet across the system and turned into close-to-period-correct freight and passenger cars for use during the different filming scenes, including the track laying and general scenic scenes such as this.

Operations on this section of the Carmi Sub (Beverdell to Pentiction) had recently been discontinued by CP, but the line was reopened one last time for filming all the mountain scenes. Upon completion of filming, a diesel locomotive and caboose were dispatched for one final movement in order to retrieve the film's railway equipment and forward it to other parts of the system. A small section of the line to the east saw service for a short period longer, but The National Dream filming were the last train movements on the western part of the Carmi Sub. The line has since been converted into a popular walking/cycling trail.

Eric W. Johnson photo, Dan Dell'Unto collection slide.

More from The National Dream:
Tracklaying: http://www.railpictures.ca/?attachment_id=55064
Filming: http://www.railpictures.ca/?attachment_id=55074
Prairie consist: http://www.railpictures.ca/?attachment_id=56449