“A Rocky Mountain Winter” is a joy to watch.  It combines some great railroad action with spectacular scenery from the Canadian Rockies.  The videography is excellent and the format is wide screen.

It’s early February 2008 and we are on the Canadian Pacific Railroad west of Calgary, Alberta, and are headed west through some of the most magnificent mountain scenery on this planet.  We see the bright red CP locomotives in three different paint schemes providing the power for unit coal trains, unit grain trains, unit potash trains, mixed manifest freights, doube stacks and auto racks.

Our route takes us alongside the Bow River through the beautiful Bow Valley as we head west.  The free-flowing Bow River runs beside the tracks and massive snow-capped sunlit peaks provide a breath-taking backdrop.

We eventually reach Morant’s Curve which is one of the most photographed railroad locations in North America.  It was named for Nicolas Morant, a Canadian Pacific photographer who used pictures from this area in promotional materials.  It is such a beautiful location that one might choose to sit there all day and stare.

My only serious complaint about this video is the total absence of maps.  Not only are maps not used but we get no overview in the narration as to the route we are going to be following.  The narration simply moves from one point to the next.

This is a serious shortcoming but the gorgeous scenery and good railroad action along with the high quality of the video and the wide screen format make this video well worth the price.  It is two hours of pure joy.  I definitely recommend this one.

A spell-binding account of a runaway train in 1977 at Rogers Pass can be found by following this link.  http://www.carknocker.com/runaway3.htm  Rogers Pass is located on this same route that we follow in this DVD.