Hi Steve,
This is off topic, but just wanted you to know that there's another former Blind Bay person on this website. We lived on Blind Bay road near the Schuswap Marina with Grandma Clyde Archer. She had one of those Lionel trains in the basement and that was how I got attracted to model trains in the first place. Eventhough, I was into HO scale trains, I helped get my father's Lionel trains which had been stored in her basement for 10s of years up and running. It still runs to this day with all the original equipment! I went to Sorrento Elementary. Small world ain't it?
Many CP trains I saw coming through the Crows Nest From Hope were more than a kilometre and had at least 5 engines pulling them. We'd be on the Trans-Canada driving from Vancouver to Blind Bay where we would spot the caboose and then several kilometres up the road (don't forget we were heading in the same direction as the trains) would run into the 2-3 engines in the middle of the train then another few kilometres up the road we would spot the head (usually another 3-4 engines). I had no way of telling whether these trains were heading towards the Okanagan or Salmon Arm, then on to Calgary. The most I ever counted on that route was 9 engines altogether. It was amazing, a lot of the trains even had those blue colored engines (what I called robots because they had no cockpits). I'm not sure, but I figure the CP trains winding through the Rockie Mountain passes must have been the longest in the world and probably several kms long ! I saw the same thing with CN trains running between Kamloops and Jasper. Hope was a decent place to view CN and CP trains because the CP tracks were on the Trans-Canada side of the highway and the CN tracks were on the other side of the river. I think that there is one point where both tracks run into each other (kind of a shared track through part of the Hells Pass).