Two small boys balanced carefully, arms askew, along the CPR tracks north of 20th. St. in Saskatoon on a hot 1930’s summer day. The kids, my friend Bernard and myself, hoped to be overtaken by a freight as we tight-rope walked along the rails. Expectantly, we glanced often back along the line toward the distant Quaker Oats mill, checking for engine-smoke in the distance. Our destination along these rails was the small CPR station over on Ave. A.

At the station we just hung around. Climbing up onto the big-wheeled baggage carts on the platform, we waited for a freight to come charging by the station, as inevitably it would. And when it came at last we would laugh and shout in clouds of exhaust-steam as the thundering, clanking, engine roared close by the platform, its enormous driving-rods making complicated patterns over the five-foot wheels. The grey-hatted head of our hero, the smiling engineer, hung out the right-hand window and as he rumbled past he waved nonchalantly, as royalty acknowledging his subjects from his royal coach. After the steam came the rhythmic clickedy-clackedy-clickedy-clack of the seemingly endless line of freight cars rolling by the platform. Finally the sounds, the smells, were gone, as the caboose diminished in the distance.

Back then, my dad was a machinist in the CN Shops in Saskatoon. Locomotive roundhouses are now all but extinct in Canada. Once when I went out to the roundhouse I had the ultimate privilege of climbing up into the cab of an engine that my dad backed out into the yard; a short but memorable journey by train.

Longer train trips were better. With a family rail-pass we were able to take a train journey most years, and we always went to the same place in the summer, to Vancouver on the west coast. A winter in Saskatoon in the 1930’s guaranteed that the coast would seem like the promised land. Nowadays, some prairie people, called ‘snow-birds’, head south by plane to escape the cold of winter. Back in my time in Saskatoon we headed west to the coast by train to escape the heat and dust of summer. The memories of those journeys now coalesce into one big adventure, experienced by a young prairie boy and his family.

Catching the west-bound train from Saskatoon meant getting up in the middle of the night, (as it still does), but interrupted sleep was a small price to pay for a train journey. We packed our bags the day before (one of these, called a “club bag” with folding leather sides, I think no longer exists). We went to bed early that night and tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep.

In the middle of the night my parents, small sister Barb, and I were delivered, sleepy-eyed, by taxi to the downtown CN Station. After visiting the baggage counter to check in some luggage with my uncle Bill who worked there (most of my English-born male relatives were railroaders), we headed outside into the summer darkness and joined other passengers on the platform. Away down the platform, at the front-end of our train, a large transcontinental engine softly thumped and sighed, breathing steam as if alive and impatient to get under way. Along the train a few workmen busily inspected things beneath the train as we made our way down the platform beside darkened coaches that towered above us. We found the number of our sleeping-car, and stepping onto the small steel stool we climbed aboard up the coach steps.

Inside, the dimly-lit coach was silent as a church as passengers slept. Hushed by our dad, we humped carry-on bags down a centre aisle lined on both sides by heavy, dark-green, numbered curtains that hung down to the floor forming a long narrow corridor. They covered passenger sections on both sides now converted into upper and lower sleeping berths.

“Here we are”, whispered dad as he pushed a bag through the curtains of our section onto folded-back white linen sheets inside. A short wooden ladder was found leaning against another section, brought over and hooked onto the railing along the upper berth. “Up you go”, said dad, and I climbed up and through the curtain into the upper berth as my parents and sister crowded in below on hands and knees. In the cramped space above, propped up on one arm, I performed contortions changing into bedclothes handed up by mother, then climbed between the cool white sheets. I lay there, beginning to dose off, listening to a few thumping-sounds coming from somewhere beneath the coach; workmen, I thought, checking things underneath. Soon, with a slight jerk as the train began to move, we were on our way at last. Beginning quietly at first, a deep rumbling from the wheels gradually got louder. Helped by the rocking of the coach, I drifted off to sleep, smiling, and I dreamed of trains.

In the chilly daylight early the next morning, Saskatchewan’s prairie fields rushed by outside our windows, dotted here and there in the distance with occasional farm houses and grain silos. Sometimes a road crossing slipped by, a minor farm road, sometimes with a truck waiting beside the tall white ‘X’ railroad sign for us to pass. It wouldn’t be too long before a man would come through the coach with the first calls for breakfast, and when we had left our section to find the dining car the berths would be made up into regular seats by a hard-working white-coated, always black, sleeping-car porter. He would pack away the green curtains, bed linen, mattresses, ladder and wooden, folding, section-dividers into the upper berth. Then the entire upper level would be hinged upward and banged into place, leaving the double seats of the section in position below. The interior colour of the coach would change from dark green to a shiny dark mahogany-brown, the colour of the seats and now-closed uppers that angled up toward the ceiling of the coach.

The running characteristics of coaches in the 1930’s and ‘40’s were far removed from those of today’s smooth-running passenger cars. As we made our way down the aisles of several coaches to find the dining-car we gripped the tops of seats as the lurching cars bounced us from side to side. Between the coaches, through ever-difficult end doors and into the flexible covered joining piece, we crossed over moving metal floor-plates to the deafening clickedy-clack of wheels running over non-welded track joints. With the floor and the end doors moving in all directions over the couplings we hurried to reach the other side. And then we would have to pass through another car, then another, until we came at last to the dining car.

There were two kinds of dining cars on our trains. The doors of the first-class diner were locked to keep out ordinary mortals; the other diner was available to the rest of us. I loved being in the dining-car with its white linen tablecloths and its chinaware, where we could watch the scenery rush by as we ate. White-coated waiters precariously balanced food on silver trays, usually successfully, as the car swayed. I recall, once, the car giving a sudden lurch while a waiter balanced his way between the tables carrying a large tray of food. The food ended up on the floor and on a few people besides, including the apologetic waiter.

Later that first morning, after we had returned to our own seats, the conductor appeared at one end of the coach checking tickets as he moved slowly up the centre isle. At our section his hand-punch snapped as he punched our ticket, then he reached over and stuck it in the lower seam of the window-blind. We were now fully authorized to be there.

Around noon, my mother opened a bag of sandwiches for our first lunch, brought to save us the cost of another trip to the dining car. It was also something to do, important for kids on a long train ride. I passed the time just lying back on the seat dreamingly watching the scenery hurrying by outside, while listening to the rhythmic sound of the wheels....chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka.....as the coach rocked its way westward. Out our window telegraph wires drooped past on their poles making an hypnotic pattern that went down and up, down and up, as the wire sagged, then rose again at each pole. Sometimes I took a walk up the aisle, and at one end of the coach I looked in at a small room that my dad called a “smoker”, with shiny brass pots on the floor and cigar smoke in the air. Unforgettable was the violently moving small washroom at the end of the coach, where you braced yourself against the edge of its tiny stainless-steel sink in order to remain upright, watching its water slosh almost over its edge. became steady, as we moved slowly onto the huge, curved, trestle. Through the window we looked straight down into an ever-deepening chasm, and it seemed as though we were suspended in midair with no sign of the tracks beneath us. A few small wooden platforms occasionally drifted by our window, jutting out from the edge of the bridge over the abyss for workmen to stand on when the trains came over. I thought what great courage it would take just to stand on one of those, suspended in space over the chasm. The slow curve of the bridge let us see the locomotive powering along at the head of the train, its big driving-rods slowly cycling up and down, and looking backward we could see the end of the train. But railroads are always changing. On recent trips over that same line the bridge had not only disappeared but the train crew that I questioned had not heard of it. Probably the ravine had been filled in long ago, or the line had been diverted.

Next morning we were in a horizon less world of rocky peaks and dark forests. Stopping for an hour or so in Jasper allowed us to go out onto the station platform into a chilly morning where we marvelled at scenery around us that was more vertical than horizontal. It was a wondrous place, and the vision of snowy peaks so high their tops were enveloped in clouds was awesome for a prairie kid growing up on table-flat land. I think, now, that my love of mountains, especially accompanied by trains, began back in those times when the mountains first greeted us in Jasper.

Once again on our way westward, the train followed the valley between high mountains, along the shore of a long lake on our left. Miles further on, past the lake and up along a steep mountainside, the train slowed to a crawl then finally stopped. The conductor came through the coach calling out “Mt. Robson, Mt. Robson”. We were pausing to allow the passengers a view, out the right-hand windows, of the snow-clad highest mountain in B.C. (nowadays the train goes through without stopping). And there it was, its high dome-shaped peak partly hidden by cloud, as it usually is even now. Then it was onward once again.

Another night on the train, and when we arose next morning we had already passed through the deep gorges of the Fraser Canyon. The mountain scenery had been replaced by the lush green of Fraser Valley farmland. Soon we would arrive in Vancouver and the first phase of our adventure would be over. We would stay in what is now called a ‘B & B’, close to English Bay, and enjoy a brief time with exotic salt-water and sand before catching our train back to Saskatoon. Exotic at least for a prairie kid more used to sand-hills and gophers than seaweeds and crabs. Our one-week stay at the Coast, and especially for me the train journey itself, were rejuvenating experiences much recalled later during the long prairie winter.

Many years have gone by since those days, and in my retirement my wife and I still catch a ride over that same line on VIA when we can. It’s harder these days to find train tracks to walk and balance along, and when you do find some you must be careful of quieter fast-moving trains. There is no more engine smoke in the distance to warn you of a coming train,

Our first major stop, for about a half-hour, was at Edmonton. Then again we were off. Further west, at one point the train began to slow down, but there was no sign of a town in the prairie outside. Dad became excited. “Watch out the window”, he said. “We’re coming onto a big bridge called the ‘Big Eddie’ ”. The rumble of the wheels lessened and the coach no huge engine wheels with driving-rods to marvel at. But the engineers still wave regally out their right-hand window as they pass by. And I still experience the same thrill as before when I stand beside a track, with a through-train carrying a long line of rumbling, clickedy-clacking, boxcars on their way to somewhere down the line.