Original subtitles

William Cornelius Van Horne

was born on a dirt farm in Illinois.

As a young man, he was given the task

of building the longest, toughest wilderness railroad

on the face of the earth,

a task many considered impossible.

They once roamed the earth by the tens of thousands.

Their whistles spoke of distant places,

of adventure and romance.

Abandoned for decades,

what memories might still be evoked,

what spirits conjured up

from an age left behind so long ago?

Their crews considered them living things,

each with a unique personality.

Some were cranky and difficult;

others, good natured and spirited.

2816 has been resurrected

by the Canadian Pacific

in an extraordinary attempt to illuminate history itself,

to summon the spirits of the past.

They were explorers, engineers,

surveyors and guides.

They traveled by boat and foot,

packhorse and raft.

They passed through landscapes

the likes of nothing else on earth.

They fell through ice, slipped from cliffs,

died in rockslides and were lost in rapids.

They followed countless rivers

and many a promising route that ended nowhere.

For years, they searched for an ideal passage

across the vast mountain wilderness of western Canada.

Some worked too late into the fall

and were ambushed by snowstorms.

Trapped in makeshift shelters,

they struggled to survive winters

that could last over six months.

After 20 years of exploration

spanning hundreds of thousands of square miles,

at least 40 men had died

and still no ideal route had been found

through the mountains.

The province of British Columbia had joined Canada

on the condition that it would be connected to the east

by a transcontinental railway.

In desperation, the federal government began construction

beside a small church on the edge of the Fraser River

in the spring of 1881.

Departing from Vancouver, what lies ahead is

one of the longest, toughest railways on earth.

An extraordinary, 3000-mile journey

for a locomotive that first turned a wheel

over 80 years ago.

The first few miles along the Fraser River flood plain

were easy going for the builders,

at least, until the line turned north

into the jaws of the Fraser Canyon.

Hard granite walls towering 3,000 feet above the river

brought construction to a painful crawl

that would last over six years.

10,000 men worked the Fraser Canyon

in the early 1880s.

6,500 were Chinese.

They blasted night and day,

drilling tunnels into the granite rock,

carving roadbeds on the sides of vertical cliffs.

Working with hand tools and black powder,

they averaged barely five feet a day.

In these canyons, six men died for every mile of track laid,

most of them Chinese.

We can only glimpse the courage of these men

in the extraordinary work they left behind.

By 1882,

construction moved out of the Fraser Canyon

and east along the Thompson River

as the railway climbed inland

up to the central plateau of British Columbia.

Here the land becomes arid

and the rock gives way to softer sandstone.

It made for easier construction,

but this barren desert absorbs little water.

Torrential rains erode and sculpt sandstone cliffs

into hoodoos that can collapse into mudslides,

and bury the line.

Here, engineers and tracklayers

encountered a new set of obstacles

that could be neither filled, nor bridged,

nor tunneled through.

When construction crews arrived at these lakes,

they fully intended to bridge them and continue.

But when they dropped weights

attached to 400 feet of rope,

they never reached the bottom.

The lakes would be simply too deep to cross.

Trains would have to take the long route around...

As they do to this day.

Where the ground was flat and the grades easy,

General Manager Van Horne pushed hard

to make up for time and money

lost in the canyons and mountains.

They were Canadians, Americans,

British, Europeans, and Asians.

They froze in bitter cold

and toiled in fierce summer heat,

eaten raw by insects.

Yet, with bare hands,

they laid as many as six miles of track every day.

In 1882,

nearly 500 miles of track

were laid in a single season...

A world record and a source of enormous pride

for the track crews.

At the railroad town of Revelstoke

the canyons, lakes and deserts

of the interior lay behind.

Relatively easy going, compared to the Selkirk

and Rocky Mountains looming ahead.

General Manager Van Horne was an amateur geologist,

a talented artist, and an accomplished violinist.

Though he was best known

as an all-night, scotch-drinking poker player.

Perhaps his greatest gamble, however,

lay in the route chosen east of Revelstoke.

Van Horne, the CPR, and the government

were anxious to keep powerful American railroads

from moving into Southern Canada.

There were two routes through the mountains being considered:

a northern route recommended by the surveyors,

and a southern route considered much more difficult

by virtually everyone.

A fateful, perhaps reckless, decision was made,

by the railway and government,

to gamble on this southern route,

where no passes were yet known to exist.

An American surveyor by the name of A. B. Rogers

had convinced many, including Van Horne,

that he could find a southern pass

through the Selkirks.

The future of the Canadian Pacific

was now in the hands of two Americans.

One, a brilliant leader and gambler,

the other, a stubborn surveyor considered wildly eccentric.

Rogers and his guides only traveled in the spring

and summer months up the western face of the Selkirks.

Ominously, they found no evidence

that humans of any kind

had ever ventured amongst these almost vertical slopes.

In the summer of 1882,

when Rogers declared he had discovered

a viable railroad pass,

he did not fully appreciate the nature of the beast

that would come to bear his name.

When engineers and tracklayers

arrived the following season, at the foot of the Selkirks,

they were appalled

by what Rogers had declared a pass.

They would have to build massive looping trestles

to give the railway distance to lessen the steep climb

up the mountain face.

For the men working here,

it was a bad omen.

The trestles were frail,

and prone to fire in the summer

and avalanches in winter.

They were soon replaced with stone pillars,

and eventually, those too were abandoned.

In February of 1910,

the chief engineer wrote to Van Horne:

"There has been a terrible accident:

"many men died last night in the valley of the Illecillewaet.

The rest are afraid."

In the early years,

this short stretch of track

would threaten the very survival

of the entire railway.

Some thought Rogers had been more than eccentric.

His ego had led him to promote a route of total madness.

Railway surveyors seek the lowest possible route

through the mountains,

like the rivers they often parallel.

In Rogers Pass,

they used side canyons to build loops,

lengthening the line to give trains more distance

to climb the mountain.

To lower the grade further would require tunnels,

at vastly greater expense.

In 1914, work began

on the five mile Connaught tunnel,

the longest in North America.

This would reduce the grades on the old route

and hide the line from relentless avalanches.

The nine-mile Mount McDonald tunnel

followed in the 1980s,

further reducing the grades.

It would take the CPR 100 years

and 14 miles of tunnels

to finally escape beneath the original line...

The folly that was Rogers Pass.

The deep cliffs and valleys

of the eastern face of the Selkirk Mountains

were no easier for the builders.

As trains begin the long, steep, downhill journey,

they will cross a series of great bridges...

At the time of construction,

the highest in the world.

At the eastern foot of the Selkirks,

the great steam trains often paused for service

at the railway town of Golden.

The Rocky Mountains lay ahead.

The inhabitants of railroad towns

once lived to serve the appetites

of the steam locomotive.

Water, grease, oil,

coaling, running repairs, day and night,

winter and summer...

preparing them to operate

at the limit of their power.

The locomotive engineer

was the folk hero in the Age of Steam.

On the modern railway, there are two possible routes

for eastbound trains.

If the shorter main line is blocked or damaged,

trains can be diverted on an easier route south,

out of the mountains.

By 1900, the railway sought to relieve the pressure

on the main line, and the terrible grades ahead,

constructing an alternate track south, along the Columbia River,

through a pass called the Crow's Nest.

But to an already long journey,

it would add hundreds of miles.

But soon after this easy southern route was opened,

the ultimate nightmare occurred

on an April night in 1903.

At 4:30 a.m., a freight train

had just passed through the mining town

of Frank, Alberta,

when much of Turtle Mountain collapsed.

The train's brakeman, Sid Choquette,

made his way in total blackness

across rocks the size of apartment buildings

in a frantic attempt to stop an express train

coming from the east.

At the last possible moment,

he stopped the Spokane Flyer bound for Washington...

saving the lives of hundreds of passengers.

He received an award from the railroad of $25.

Roughly 90 souls on the edge of town

were not so lucky.

They remain buried under the slide to this day.

There would be no easy route

through these mountains after all,

but there is an easy stretch along the Kicking Horse River

before the greatest challenge of all...

The towering Rocky Mountains ahead.

The railroad town of Field is at the foot

of the steepest stretch of track in the Rockies.

In 1886, the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia

designed a special series of locomotives

to help move heavy trains up and down the CPR's Big Hill.

These Consolidation-class engines

were enormously successful, except for number 314.

Descending the Big Hill in 1899,

314 ran away and jumped the track, killing its crew.

Rebuilt and renumbered,

but this time climbing the Big Hill,

it blew itself to pieces, killing another crew.

Repaired again, it worked up and down the Big Hill

for 30 more years,

all the time feared and despised by its crews.

The 20 miles ahead remain, to this day,

among the most challenging stretches of track

in all of railroading.

20 years after the railway was opened,

the terrible grades on the Big Hill were reduced

by one of the most famous engineering projects

in the history of railroading...

The spiral tunnels.

The tunnels give the line additional distance

to climb the steep western face of the Rocky Mountains.

Through both an upper and lower tunnel,

long freight trains cross over themselves

by looping around inside the mountain.

The Last Spike was driven at Craigellachie

in the fall of 1885... An extraordinary accomplishment

for the tiny new country of Canada.

But soon after transcontinental trains

began running from sea to sea...

it was apparent the railway had profoundly miscalculated

one significant detail...

Winter.

Virtually no one had ever ventured

into Rogers Pass in the winter,

and for good reason.

It had among the deepest known snowfalls in the world...

As much as 60 feet in a single season.

On February 28, 1910, a gang of 60 men were working

to clear an avalanche in the pass.

At midnight, another slide came down

the opposite side of the valley

and killed all but one.

Most of the men were Japanese.

At least 250 men would die in avalanches in Rogers Pass alone

in the first few years of operation.

When construction began, few could have imagined

the terrible sacrifices the southern route would entail.

The new railway and the country itself

hung on the thinnest of threads.

The mountain sections were ruinously expensive to operate

and the company teetered on bankruptcy.

It would take a miracle to save the Canadian Pacific Railway.

A miracle did occur.

Just over the top of the Continental Divide,

on the east face of the Rocky Mountains,

was a place the surveyors called the most beautiful on earth.

They named it Banff.

The toughest route through the mountains

was also the most spectacular.

This simple irony would help save the railway

and perhaps the country itself.

A national park system followed the railway.

Banff, Lake Louise,

Jasper, Glacier, Yoho.

News of a wilderness Shangri-La spread around the globe,

and the company had a thriving new business: tourism.

Van Horne built a series of great hotels,

including the most famous, at Lake Louise...

followed by a fleet of legendary passenger trains

to bring in the tourists.

From the summit of the Rocky Mountains,

the big-wheeled Hudson locomotives ran down

the long, fast mountain slope to the prairie below.

A hundred miles an hour was routine

for the great express trains in the Age of Steam.

As the railway grew and prospered, the country followed.

Trains brought in settlers, opening up the land.

They hauled produce to market,

they built towns and cities.

They took soldiers away to war...

remembered by those left behind

by the sound of a lonesome wail.

Van Horne's railway grew into a vast network.

The great express trains flowed day and night

across the high grass prairie,

the granite shores of Lake Superior,

the rich farmland of the St. Lawrence Valley,

and finally down to the seaport of Montreal.

Van Horne completed the impossible railroad

in half the time required by the contract.

The son of an American dirt farmer,

he rose to become one of the greatest figures

in all of Canadian history.

But here in Rogers Pass, in the valley of the Illecillewaet,

the legend of Van Horne and his railway

might have had a much different ending.

Their names are worn from wood and stone and lost forever.

They were young and strong.

With bare hands they endured unimaginable hardship.

The route chosen was nearly impossible,

yet they had faith in the future and they found a way.

We know them only by the railway

and the extraordinary country they built:

Canada.