TRAINS

I have had a lifelong fascination with trains.
Where we lived in Waterville, until dad died in 1963 when I was eighteen years old, was across the tracks from the railway station. I have mentioned somewhere in my scribblings that Mother had a very neurotic attitude about my dads irresponsible history with cars. Hence we never had one. Buses, bikes and trains were our transport options.
Dad was a model railroad enthusiast. He was always assembling railway carriages, tankers and various types of rolling stock. He made most of the bodies by hand and only purchased the engines, trucks, couplings etc. from the model suppliers. There was a room in our house devoted to his hobby. He built the infrastructure, laid out the tracks, built tunnels and mountains while mother did much of the scenery painting and Sheila and I made trees, shrubs and other things to enhance the reality. Like most projects it was never finished and after dad died it got packed away, sold off and died with him.
I must have shared his obsession. There were two or three trains each day that serviced the B.F. Goodrich rubber factory that was the sole industry in our town. Dad was the Chief Engineer.I think I was nine or ten when I began to ‘ befriend ‘ the engineers and firemen who drove the trains. I initially was invited to climb up and look. Then I was allowed to ride with them while they shunted goods in and out and finally I was shown how to stoke the firebox. The fireboxes on these engines were about three meters ( 10 feet ) long. The skill was to fling the coal all the way back and to the spots where it was needed. Both brawn and skill were required. Several years later I was a guest for a 40th birthday party aboard the Lyttleton tugboat that was by then a tourist attraction run by volunteers. The party was upstairs, but I was more interested in the boiler room down below. I asked the stoker if I could shovel some coal. Reluctantly he said yes and within a minute he said, ‘ where the hell did you learn to do that? ‘ Proudly I told the story as I am telling it now.
I used to know all the trains that came through, by their numbers and by how many wheels they had. We would go to the nearby market town by train and sometimes we went to Montreal ( 120 kilometers away ) to visit family and friends. We travelled to Boston and New York from time to time. I have mentioned elsewhere that I made 12 trips from Montreal to Lake Louise when I was a summer student worker at the Canadian Pacific Railway owned and run resort hotel, the Chateau Lake Louise. Three days and two nights on the train.
Stephanie and I travelled by train often in Europe. We took the Orient Express from Munich to Athens once and while travelling across Asia we trained from Calcutta to Darjeeling on a tiny gauge train that crawled up the side of the Himalayan mountains to the tea plantation over 3000 meters up. A few weeks later we travelled across India from Lucknow to Delhi. I have travelled up and down New Zealand by train and boat. Most memorable was a mid winter trip from Christchurch to Greymouth on the Trans Alpine Express. Two feet of snow had fallen in the mountains and the train spewed up waves of snow as it crashed through. Through the spiral tunnels and out into sunshine in semi rainforest on the Westland side. Spectacular.
There were other memorable train trips. Adelaide to Alice Springs in Australia on the goods Afghan train was interesting, especially when the carriages ran out of water. We were saved by some America GI’s who were on R & R from the Vietnam war and they had many cases of beer. The magic of beer. Perhaps the most memorable trip was after Stephanie and I had worked four months at the Banff Springs Hotel and we were returning to London to continue our ‘ working holiday ‘ in Europe.
I had been friendly with the Assistant Manager and he generously ( and probably illegally ) organized a first class double bedroom from Banff to Montreal on the CPR train known as ‘ the Canadian ‘. We stayed a week with Hudson Vipond in Montreal, then boarded an Amtrak train to New York. My friend had organized a 3 room suite for 3 nights at the Drake hotel on 42nd Street. No cost for anything except the Amtrak leg. We then boarded the SS France for a four day crossing of the Atlantic and then, back to reality.
Trains have been my friend. Sadly in New Zealand they are almost non-existent. They are too expensive and they can’t compete with cheap airfares. If I was flush with money I would do the Rocky Mountaineer one more time and probably the Punjab Express or the Maharajah Luxury Tour trains that travel all over amazing India.
From another perspective you might consider watching Agatha Christie’s ‘ Murder on the Orient Express. You could read Pierre Burton’s ‘ The Last Spike ‘ which tells the story of making a railroad across 10,000 kilometers of Canada and if you don’t have time or inclination to read that you could listen to Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘ The Canadian Railway Trilogy ‘ and get an idea of the size, the grind and the grandeur of the railroad. You might also watch the Feral Lutheran pictorial rendition of the Trilogy which you can find on You Tube.