A Train Across Canada

For the past six weeks I have been blogging on the songs of my album, one by one; their back stories, some inside info on their recording, lyrics, a link to the song and anything else I can think of to trick you into buying a copy.

This week, more than halfway through the album, we will be taking an intermission and discussing something else while we turn over the record.

You remember records?

When I was fifteen, my family went on the best vacation of my youth A cross-country rail journey from Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Vancouver BC.

It was my first trip to the West Coast, my first ride in a 747 and most importantly my first ride on a real train. 

There was adventure, wilderness, an entire day spent on my own, bad smells, extreme cold, extreme pain and, quite nearly, romance.

I have always loved travel, Canada and trains, so I was looking forward to our trip with triple threat anticipation.

I can remember the excitement I felt when I saw the shining train on the indoor platform at Toronto's Union Station. I knew this wasn't the Orient Express in the 1930s. There wasn't steam flowing on the platform from the cars and locomotive, there weren't servicemen kissing their girlfriends goodbye or rich ladies in large ornate hats boarding the train as porters toted carts laden with opulent looking trunks, but there might as well have been for all my romantic ideas about train travel and how I felt to be boarding the train myself.

Union Station Toronto

Our seats on the train had pairs of bench seats facing one another on either side of a center aisle. My brother and I sat on one set of seats, our parents and little sister sat in the seats across the aisle. Those two sections were walled-off from the next set of seats but not from the other or the aisle in between. Even though passengers and porters passed through the aisle between us our family had relative privacy most of the time. A section was converted to sleepers at night but I'll talk about that when night falls.

The train pulled out of Union Station around 1PM. I felt a euphoria as the train began slowly and silently gliding on the rails, out of the covered station platform, past the base of the CN Tower and clacking over switches. My brother and I wasted no time in exploring the train from front to back. Forward of the Sleeper cars was the dinning car and then the coach section with rows of seats. In front of those cars was what I would call the “ghetto coach”. The ghetto coach had the bare bones appearance of a city bus or a subway car. It occupied by Native Americans, backpackers and students. My father joined us as we went to the other end of the train and watched Toronto pass behind us from the outside rear vestibule of the last car like a politician on the campaign trail.

During our 'rounds' my brother and I noticed two cute girls on the train who were a bit younger than us. We did some casual but largely unsuccessful flirting.

Though the train was bound for the west coast of Canada we spent the rest of that first day going due North. By 10PM that night we were in Sudbury, Ontario, What looked like from the train to be an old, burned-out nickle mining town as far North from Toronto as Chicago is from St. Louis. We had the choice of staying on the train while they added cars from Ottawa and points East or getting off for about forty minutes. We were going to be on the train plenty so my father, my brother and I got off, while my mom and sister stayed on. The three of us wandered around the area surrounding the Station a bit but there wasn't much to see in Sudbury at 10PM. It didn't look like there was much to see at high noon either.

Sudbury, Ontario

Little did I know I was in the home town of a celebrity that I would one day work extensively with: Alex Trebek.

Something else I didn't know at the time was that, on one of the train cars being added to our train from Ottawa, was a lovely girl my age named Sue.

When we re-boarded the train our seats had been transformed. The porter had come through and made up the beds by lowering the upper berths hinged from the ceiling and running parallel to the aisle. For the lower berths they folded the opposite facing benches down and together so they met in the middle and formed one bed instead of two seats. Curtains had been hung along the aisle enclosing each berth into a little club house... at least that's how I saw it.

Think “Some Like it Hot” not “North by Northwest”
Small stairways hooked to the side of the berths to allow a full-bladdered person in the upper berth an
exit strategy in the middle of the night. Unlike ladders used in more modern trains, the stairways had steps that folded flat against the side of the aisle until the hand rail was pulled down. A spring creaked and several steps folded down. When one stepped off the stairs the spring pulled the steps back up and out of the way of passers-by in the aisle.

These spring loaded steps fold up when no weight is on them.

I was on the lower berth, my brother in the upper. I was happy about this because I had a window to look out of. My brother, who preferred total darkness to sleep, was happy too.

I didn't sleep at first. I was too fascinated looking out my window. The moonlight showed me just how far into the wilderness we had traveled. Unbroken forest was all I could see for mile after mile. Ten miles... twenty miles... not so much as a road crossing.

Every once is a while, the train would lurch a bit and I would hear the old spring for the folding stairway creak down a few inches then creak back up a moment later with a gentle 'smack' as the steps flattened to the side of the berth. When I finally gave in to the sandman, I slept easily. Though I awoke every once in a while to open my curtain and see that we were still deep in the forest, the train rocked me into what I regard to this day as the best night of sleep I have ever had.

When I awoke to the light of morning I checked out the window again. There were still no signs of civilization, but it was quite different than what I had seen during the night.

The train was on a ledge between a cliff face and an endless body of water. The cliff face obscured any view to the train's right and the narrowness of the ledge at times offered little more than a view of some rocks and the water twenty or thirty feet below. Occasionally the tracks would pass through an outcropping of rock into which short tunnels had been cut.

It was: a short cliff; a ledge with the train tracks; a small drop; rocks and water. It was like the train had gone to some other-wordly place while I slept.

 Between a rock and wet place, the North shores of Lake Superior.

A quick check of the map I had brought with me (bit of a map nerd I am) confirmed what I suspected; it was the shore of Lake Superior we were following so closely.

After breakfast in the dinning car, my brother and I made our daily patrol up and down the train. At the end of the train we discovered among the new cars added to the train was a lounge car. We were disappointed at first when we discovered that, instead of a nice outdoor vestibule we could hang out on, the new lounge car had a rounded end with no vestibule at all, just smoky lounge chairs and ashtrays and a few older folks smoking cigarettes.

 A Canadian Pacific Observation just like the one on our train.

Our disappointment was short lived; as we turned around to return we could see a flight of stairs going up and the blue sky beyond. We wasted no time in charging up the stairs. From a car in our own train set we knew what kind of car this was. The stairs led to an observation deck enclosed by a plexiglass bubble. Rows of forward facing seats two by two filled the compartment. We spent a few minutes looking at the landscape of Lake Superior's North shore which had by now given way to some trees and a view inland but still very little in the way of roads or man-made structures.

Even though there wasn't a whole lot to do, we were never bored. I adored being in motion while I could walk around, read, look at my maps, eat, sleep, go to the bathroom... No matter what I was doing I was on my way to somewhere else. My wanderlust was being fed constantly. 
 
The next day was my mother's birthday, August 11. We did a few things to celebrate but what I recall the most was that after dark, my father took us to the bubble car to watch the peak of the year's meteor activity, also on August 11^th. We didn't have much success watching meteors. Even the low level lighting in the bubble reflected off the rounded surface of the plexiglass dome from every angle with such a vengeance, it was a challenge to see anything at all, let alone meteors streaking across the sky. I also remember it being quite cold. The cars air conditioning operated day and night regardless of temperature fluctuations. 
 
We lasted for all of fifteen minutes before retreating to our berths.

By the next morning we were deep into the Canadian plains. I noticed that towering grain elevators, known as “Co-ops” in the US were called “Pools” in Canada. I wondered, though only for a moment, why anyone would put a swimming pool in a grain elevator.

Care for a swim? Or some wheat?

The flat landscape and our third day of train travel had my brother and I walking the length of the train more. We had stopped visiting the ghetto coach. We were starting to get some funny looks.

In our travels we met Sue who was also making their rounds up and down the train. She had long light brown hair, a cute face and a svelte figure.

We talked a bit and wound up hanging out in her father's compartment. She had a hard time convincing the the porter of this who eventually chased us out. After that, we hung out at my seat.

Her name was Sue, Sue Armstrong. 

I remembered that just now, just as I type the first “Sue”.

I was in love... or lust or maybe both... Whatever a fifteen year old guy is when he meets a beautiful girl that doesn't seem to be outright repelled. Not only was she beautiful, and pretty cool, she seemed to like me, or at least tolerate me; either was a novelty.

We laughed at some of the cowboy whistle stops along the way. Towns like Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw. We talked about school and the stuff that teenagers talk about. She talked about life in Canada, I talked about life in the US. We determined for a fifteen-year-old there wasn't much different.

She broke my heart not long after that when she announced that she was disembarking from the train in Calgary, our next stop. They were visiting her grandparents there.

I wanted to ask for her address so I could write her but I was suddenly stricken with chicken. I had only known for for part of a day. I couldn't manage to blurt it out.

“Um... um, kn'aye... kn'aye... um get... um maybe... getchur... um... like, address er something?”

No, I didn't talk like a Valley Dude, but it's the best I could do to portray the slur I was afraid would pour from my mouth like sludge.

If only I had met her two days ago when she joined the train in Sudbury?

When the train stopped in Calgary, the moment got the best of me and I got off onto the platform and managed to awkwardly ask for her address. She gave it freely but, like an idiot, I had not brought anything to write with or on. Not wanting to looking more like an idiot I didn't ask her for anything to write with either.

I repeated the address to myself as I said goodbye and made my way back on the train. By the time I could write anything down in my brain the address had devolved to a series of sounds I could quite turn back into words anymore. I jotted down what I thought I had heard but it wasn't anything close to an usable address.

She was gone forever. What a romantic fool I was... er am.

I was depressed. I slouched in my seat and looked out the window. Even the spectacular view of the plains dramatically giving way to the Canadian Rockies didn't penetrate my funk. I was looking back towards Calgary anyhow.

Later that day my family disembarked ourselves in the Alpine-looking Banff, Alberta.
While my dad worked out our rental car that we would drive north through the mountains to Jasper I watched a freight train approach from the station platform. It was on the closest track and going full bore! It didn't appear to be slowing down.

I deliberately stood about three feet from the edge of the platform. I was going to enjoy the rush of the train going by. I'm pretty sure my parents weren't watching.

When the first locomotive was about twenty yards away I realized I was too close for comfort. I told my feet to back away calmly so that we wouldn't look like the idiot we were. If my feet had eyes they would have been deer in headlights. They were scared into paralysis. Fortunately, so was my bladder.

It looks like we're riding this one out.

The first engine roared by me at incredible volume and the steepest Doppler shift I had ever heard. Three more engines followed in rapid-fire succession over two seconds. The cars roared past creating respectable noise on their own accompanied by a blast of air from between each set of cars.
Had the wind not blown my hair straight up I would not have looked any different for it was standing straight up on it's own.

Eventually I was able to gather myself enough to move away from the train and get to the bathroom in the station before a cleanup was necessary.

The whole town smelled a bit like a bathroom. That was due to the sulfur hot springs that the town had been built around as a spa resort. If there are enough pine trees and fancy chateaus and restaurants, a bad smell becomes merely 'charming'.

The next day we went for a dip in the hot springs. It was really just a big pool that happened to be really hot, which was crazy because it was August and rather warm to begin with, but It was fun anyhow.

Banff Hot Springs

Afterwords, my brother and I exited the men's changing room to be face-to-face with the two cute girls we had unsuccessfully flirted with some days earlier on the train. Without a word we both simply turned on our heels and went back into back into the changing room as if we'd seen a ghost. I have no idea why, probably immaturity but I'm going with: ' it was funny'.

After a day or so in Banff we headed North through Banff National Park. We saw lakes that were robins egg blue and an amazing looking resort called The Fairmont Chateau at Lake Louise. We didn't drove in for a quick look because my grandmother had often talked about it and my Mom wanted to see it.

The Fairmont Chateau at Lake Louise

The water of the lakes in this area is really this shade of blue

caused by minerals in the mountain runoff.

We visited the Athabaska Glacier or at least the very tip of it. It was bizarre to climb around ice in August. Where there wasn't ice there was this sticky silty mud. My mom and some stranger who looked like Santa Claus both ended up stepping in mud that went nearly to their knees. My dad took a picture of them together with their muddy pant legs. A bus full of tourists got stuck in it as well.

Ice in August.
The Athabasca Glacier in Banff National Park.

On the road to Jasper I saw cross-country skiers training on the road. They were skiing on wheeled skis that looked like elongated roller blades. I have seen them many times since but in 1980 it was a strange sight.

That evening we arrived in Jasper, Alberta. We checked into a cool suite that seemed more like an apartment than hotel room. I was fascinated by the large rail switch yard nearby. When the rest of my family planned to spend the next day at a park hiking and looking at waterfalls, I asked if I could stay behind and simply watch the trains. They asked me if I was sure and gave their blessing when I said I was.

I had a wonderful day of watching trains even though I felt odd being by myself and missed my folks and brother and sister from time to time. It all paid off when one of the engineers who had seen me watching the trains for most of the day allowed me to see the inside of one of the freight locomotives.

The next day we boarded the train that would take us the rest of the way to Vancouver. It was a beautiful train ride but I had grown a bit tired of the train and so much beautiful nature. I was ready for a city again.

Vancouver was the perfect city for my jones. We ate at an Indian restaurant where the waiters doubted I could handle the food when I asked for “extra spicy”. Another night we went to at a French restaurant where the stick-thin waitress doubted my brother and I could finish an adult portion.

Apparently, we were the first teenagers she had ever run across.

We took a ferry to Vancouver Island and drove to the seaward side. On the way we we stopped in a paper mill town called Port Alberni. It was covered with smoke and smelled horrible. Even though it was a beautiful place, I couldn't imagine living there because of the smell. My dad explained that there was a rare weather condition happening that day called an inversion, where descending cold air traps warm air close to the ground prevents things like smoke from the paper mill from escaping into the atmosphere. I'm sure Port Alberni doesn't always smell but I will always think of it as that stinky, smokey town on Vancouver Island.

We spent the night in a tiny coastal town called Uclet. My brother and I went swimming/ body surfing in forty-nine degree water. It was so cold it was painful until my whole body went numb. It was crazy, but when you are fifteen and meet the Pacific ocean for the first time, you swim!

We also hired a small boat that took us out into the ocean a ways for the sport of it and to see a rock island. It might not have been so remarkable had every inch not been covered with sea lions. The sea got a bit rough on our way back to shore. The twenty-four foot craft bobbed like a cork in the six to ten foot swells. My mom felt sick and had to go below. I was a bit queasy myself but I found that it was better to stay out in the fresh air where I could see the horizon and positioned near the back of the boat where it didn't pitch quite so much.

Back in Vancouver we visited the Pacific National Exhibition, the west coast version of a sort of national fair. At the PNE there was a guy who was selling this little thing that I just had to have. I saw a group of college age kids in a circle tossing this small object among themselves using only their feet. It was called a “hacky sack” I used most of what personal money I had left to buy one.

I wonder what ever happened to it?

 A CP Air 747 like the one we flew on.

The next leg of the journey was to fly back to Toronto. My swim in the icy Pacific had given me a sinus infection which was not problematic until the 747 began it's descent and the pressure began to push on my clogged sinuses.

The pain in my forehead was like an ice pick being driving into my skull. Juxtaposed to this pain was the amazing beauty of flying over Toronto at night, my first time flying after dark. The grid of lights was amazing to see but...

“OW, OW, OW! MY HEAD!”

Even after we landed and I was off the plane the pain did not go away. Would I be like this forever? On my way to the baggage claim, my ears and sinuses cleared all at once with a satisfying “ssschlooop!”

The pain free state afterwords read as euphoria. I had felt euphoria when the train pulled out of Union Station a week before. Book ends to my trip.

It was an unforgettable trip. It must have been because I wrote this blog from memory alone.
Months later after we went home and resumed our regular lives, I decided that, even though I had only part of an address for Sue, the girl on the train, I would try to get a letter to her anyway. I had to at least try. I wasn't even sure of the town let alone the street address. I wrote an approximation of the name of the town then in included in parenthesis (you know how I love those) “Somewhere near Ottawa.”

In my letter I said: “I wonder if you really exist or if you were just a dream.”

About two months later I actually received a reply from Sue. It started out...


         Dear Joel,
               I exist...

She went on to talk about skiing and trivial things. She said nothing of being glad to hear from me or how magic our time together on the train was... Probably because it was nothing of the sort really, just me over romanticizing once again.

I wrote her back but I never heard from her again.

I wonder if she'll ever see the show with the crazy ATM that I have been working on in Canada, or if she ever watches “Jeopardy”. She'll have no idea that guy operating that crazy ATM or the guy changing the scores on Jeopardy was the guy she hung out with for a day on the train, the guy who sent her a letter with practically no address.


A guy who loves trains.