2 December 2004 KVR Helped Shape Berton's National Dream The cinematic version of Pierre Berton's The National Dream, a monumental Canadian television series for its day, was partly filmed on the Okanagan's Kettle Valley Railway.   With its wooden trestles, tunnels, and undisturbed natural environment, the KVR of the early 1970s was a perfect stand-in for the Canadian Pacific Railway main line, circa 1880.   "The beauty of shooting on the KVR was the crew didn't have to worry about modern buildings getting in the frame. The railway was in the process of being abandoned by then, so even the telephone poles had been taken out," Randy Manuel, curator of the Penticton Museum, said Wednesday. Berton himself helped oversee production during the three days of shooting on the KVR between Kelowna and Penticton in June of 1972.   "There was lots of attention to detail, making sure the docudrama looked as authentic as possible," recalls Manuel, who was 24 when he was hired to work as a production assistant during the filming.   Manuel had breakfast every day with Berton in a caboose donated by the CPR for the filming.   "As a young man very interested in history, it was a great honour to meet someone like Pierre Berton, who really understood and cared for the past and who had a way of making it come alive," Manuel said.   In researching the books The National Dream and The Last Spike, Berton, who died this week at age 84, persistently quizzed longtime railwaymen for all the details he could find relating to construction of the CPR main line.   "He'd want to know how was this bridge built, how was this cut made, what happened here, how was the track laid there," said a former CPR engineer who lives in Kelowna. Berton's passion for historical precision was coupled with a populist writing style that helped his 50 books sell well with ordinary people, even if they were sometimes dismissed by literary critics and professional historians. "The books were well researched and written with a flow of language that made them highly readable, as opposed to dull, dusty historical tomes," said Barrie Clark, a Kelowna city councillor and former radio talk show host who interviewed Berton dozens of times over the years.   The bow-tie-wearing author also worked as a newspaper columnist, editor of Maclean's magazine and is perhaps best remembered as a panelist on the current affairs quiz show Front Page Challenge.