While the SkyTrain might feel like an everyday piece of Vancouver that's been around forever, in the early 1980s it was an unknown.
Not only was it to be the first rapid transit system in the city, it included a bunch of brand-new technology that wasn't in use anywhere in the world. So as part of the project BC Transit made a video to help introduce people to it.
Produced in 1983, On Track is both an educational video while also cheerleading the whole project. Everything from the (incredibly 80s) swelling soundtrack to the enthusiastic narration to the sunny shots of the city to the enthusiastic, if cheesy, descriptions is meant to excite people for the SkyTrain's arrival.
"There comes a time in the life of a city, a point of maturity when its growth and the growth of human interaction within it begin to conflict," states the narrator, describing the need for transit in some exceedingly lofty terms.
A lot of the narration is like that, from "culture can be defined as all that a people are and do at any particular time and place" to "people will ride deep below the high-rise towers."
While its rhetoric can be a bit over the top, the video is interesting for a few reasons. First, there are lots of shots of Vancouver pre-Expo 86.
Then there all the shots for transit nerds, showing how the system and cars were built, and explaining all the new technology going into the SkyTrain.
"The world will come here to examine and to buy," notes the narrator.
The video shows project in its earliest days, starting in 1982 as the first sites are prepped. It ends in 1983 with the placement of the first cars on the first section of line.
There are also artists' renderings of the stations yet to be built in Vancouver, Burnaby, and New Westminster.
It may seem odd now, but the video never mentions the word SkyTrain. That's because the system hadn't received the moniker yet, and was simply the Vancouver Regional Rapid Transit project.
While originally made in 1983, the video was uploaded in 2011 by TransLink.
