iN VIDEO: Travel from Lytton to Revelstoke in half-an-hour in 1966
The TransCanada Highway through Kamloops is one of the most important transportation routes in B.C.
In the early days of wheeled travel, it wasn’t easy to get there.
First came the Cariboo Wagon Road through the Fraser Canyon to Barkerville, built between 1862 and 1865.
“In 1866, another wagon road was built from Cache Creek to Savona, which provided access to the Columbia River goldfields around Revelstoke,” according to a BC government website on the TransCanada Highway from Hope to Kamloops.
READ MORE: BC’s first trans-provincial highway stalled before it reached the Okanagan
But the wagon road through the Fraser Canyon was not to last.
“At 9.00 a.m. on May 15, 1880, Mr. R. Bray ignited the first blast of dynamite at No. 1 tunnel, just north of Yale, marking the start of the western segment of the continent-spanning Canadian Pacific Railway,” according to Explore North. “That first blast of dynamite also threw rock across the Great Wagon Road, and it was 70 years before the road resumed its dominant role in the Canyon.”
The railway destroyed many sections of the old wagon road.
“After difficult and challenging work, the Fraser Canyon section of Highway 1 was completed in the late 1960s,” the BC Government website says. “There are seven tunnels in all, ranging in length from 91 metres to 640 metres, the last two tunnels opening to traffic in 1966.
“While the old road went around obstacles, the new one had to go through them to meet the required standard though, between Lytton and Spence’s Bridge, the old road was sandwiched in between the railway and the river, forcing the contractors to move out into the river using retaining walls.”
Although the TransCanada Highway (Highway 1) was officially opened in 1962 it wasn’t fully finished until 1971.
In those intervening years, the “Highways Department” sent cars around the province recording the roadway every 25 metres or so on 16 mm film then running them together as a video.
READ MORE: iN VIDEO: Here’s a unique view of road travel through the Okanagan in 1966
One of those videos, from 1966, followed the TransCanada from Lytton to Revelstoke.
It can be sped up to reach a destination faster or slowed to see what the country really looked like.
The drive through Kamloops starts at about the 16:30-minute mark on the 30-minute video.
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