I grew up on a remote lake in northwestern Ontario. Our village was accessible only by rail or boat. When I was small, in the 1950s, we had two steam trains a day, one eastbound and one westbound. We could catch the eastbound just before breakfast, ride the hundred miles into Port Arthur, do our business and grocery shopping, jump on the evening train and be home that night. I was about six years old the year they took the steamers off the rails. I remember coming out past the Neebing yards and seeing the steam locomotives being busted up for scrap. I cried my eyes out.
Over the years, as the highways were built, the train service diminished. By the 1970s we were one of the only places along the line between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay with no road in or out. We went from two trains a day to one: eastbound Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, westbound Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Soon enough they took our real train away and replaced it with a railiner. You know the kind: two cars with a combined engine/baggage car up front and a coach behind. Not a real train, but it got us to town and home again. Often the only passengers we saw on the train were retired railway guys riding on their passes.
Usually when I rode the train, I’d ride in the baggage car. I’d sit with the mailbags and the stray pieces of local express freight, chatting with Bernie, the baggage man. On one memorable trip, the engineer was eating his lunch out of a classic gunmetal tin lunchbox. As he was chewing the last of his sandwich, he turned to me and asked, “Ya wanna drive?”
Like any self-respecting fifteen-year-old, I said, “Sure!”
I sat down on the seat, my foot on the deadman’s pedal. “Just keep ’er out of the ditch,” he said with a chuckle.
I was fifteen years old and I was driving the CN train. It’s a very strange perspective to see the rails disappear under you from the front of a railiner.
The engineer, having finished his sandwich, started in on a butter tart wrapped in waxed paper.
“Pull the whistle,” he said. “There’s a crossing coming up.”
One short and one long pull on the cord. The whistle sounded just like what I’d heard all my life.
The butter tart now gone, the driver pulled out a package of Players Navy Cut and a set of Vaughn papers. He rolled himself a smoke. We all smoked hand-rolled in those days. Tailor-mades were a treat from town. The engineer seemed reasonably sure that his train was in good hands, so he reached into the pocket of his jacket that was slung over the back of the seat. Out of the pocket came a mickey of Hudson’s Bay rye. Without a second thought, he twisted the cork plug. It made an eek-eek sound as he pulled it out. He took a long pull from the bottle. After wiping his lips with his sleeve and gasping gently, he reached out his hand and said, “You wanna slug?”
It was becoming clear why the train seldom, if ever, ran on time.
In a few years CN took the train off completely. The community that existed died along with it. We remained isolated until a logging road touched our lakeshore in the mid-1980s.
I still miss the train.
Atikokan, Ontario