Caption: Hundreds of "navvies" labour over the prairies to lay Canada's new transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific, connecting eastern Canada to British Columbia. Using primative hand tools, horses and carts, and good old fashioned manual labour, they toil on to met Van Horne's goal of laying 500 miles of track across the prairies in the single season during the Summer of 1882 (spoiler: they only got 417 miles laid due to the weather).

This would have been the story in the 1880's, but this photo was actually taken in 1973 during the CBC's filming of Pierre Berton's "The National Dream", documenting the story of laying Canada's transcontinental railway from sea to sea. Difficult conditions in the mountains, hot prairies, and rocky northern Ontario "Canadian Shield" mixed with political and monitary difficulties made the construction a feat of its own.

According to a source on the matter, the track-laying filming scenes here were done on CP's Cassils Subdivision between Miles 9 and 9.5, on the curve approaching Kitsum, Alberta (unsure of exact geolocation on map).

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