Sorry it’s taken so long to get back to this thread.
Needless to say, the trip was fantastic, made all the more so since, as I mentioned in my last post, the film crew decided after the first day to make it four days instead of three, as originally planned. The trade-off for the extra day on the train was one less day in Calgary, so I didn’t have time to go to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. I was disappointed, but maybe next time.
The train included two restored 1950s passenger cars in which we “VIPs” were ensconced, but right ahead of this the film crew worked out of a box car with a long counter running about half its length. (You can get a glimpse of it here.) This car had two large cargo doors on each side, and many of us spent as much time as we could standing in them, feeling the wind through our hair, and getting unrestricted views of the amazing scenery going by. The weather was great virtually the whole time. Cool, with mostly clear skies.
The route we took is not usually traveled by passenger trains anymore, only freight trains. A train buff friend of mine who was along on the trip said that railfans call this “rare mileage.” Indeed.
The only downside was that I didn’t get to ride in the cab of the Empress during the actual trip, only in the yard before we started, as I mentioned above. But that was good enough. During the trip, the director and camera assistant were up there a lot of the time, remotely operating the IMAX camera when it was mounted on the engine.
Some of the other guests got to ride in the cab of the 1950s diesel engine that was part of the train (it lightens the load on the steam engine), but they reported it was fairly boring, since it was behind the tenders and there wasn’t much of a view. So I didn’t press my hosts to get me up up there.
I took about 1,300 pictures over four days. (Thank Og for digital cameras!) Here’s a selection: http://picasaweb.google.com/jthyder.
Any questions?
