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magazine / ja11
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July/August 2011 issue |
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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Whistle stop
Yesterday, I ate half a large Locomotive.
I have also eaten a Steam Engine, a Boxcar and a Bogie
Caboose. No, I’m not a metal crusher. I’m just a patron
of the best pizza shop in eastern Ontario, if not the world:
Mountain Station Pizza. Proprietor PJ Breaks (a.k.a. Pizza
Pete) is a poet, a former National Research Council lab technician
and a rail aficionado who has built a business in the rural
hamlet of Mountain, Ont., by crafting railway-monikered
pizzas with artistic integrity.
The pizzeria, adorned with railway mementoes, is a former
rail hotel just down the road from a long-disused station and a
stone’s toss across the road from one of Canadian Pacific’s main
east-west freight lines. As the boxcars, container cars, tankers
and auto carriers thunder past like clockwork, clanging, roaring
and clattering, Pete expounds for waiting customers on
society, politics and, most passionately, railway culture.
He likes to tell the story, supported by a single snapshot, of
the engineer who phoned in with an order and, half an hour
later, brought a long freight train to a slow, squealing stop,
climbed down from the cab, jogged over, walked in, picked up
and paid for his Iron Horse (a triple-cheese special), hustled back
to his idling locomotive, tooted the whistle and headed east.
I suspect he contravened several of CP’s stringent safety codes.
I hear that whistle blowing most days, because those tracks
are just three kilometres from my house, far enough that my
foundation doesn’t shake, but close enough to hear the rhythmic,
romantic rumble and clack — muffled by the leaves in
summer, clear in winter. I’m among millions of Canadians for
whom the railway is ever-present. Not surprising, considering
how its 60,000-kilometre web of tracks weaves in and around
the places where most of us live and work. More than 95,000 Canadians (not counting Pete) work in rail or rail-related
industries. We take 77 million passenger train rides a year.
Try to name a commodity that isn’t transported by train.
On an epic cross-country, rail-riding assignment for
Canadian Geographic, writer Monte Paulsen and photographer
Tobin Grimshaw recently experienced Canada’s rail system more deeply than most. They travelled by freight train west
over the Rocky Mountains and by passenger trains from
Vancouver to Halifax, with side trips to see Toronto’s doubledecker
commuter trains and Trois-Rivières’ shortline railway.
They rubbed elbows with engineers, trackmen, porters and
corporate heads, and got to grips with the scope, economics
and innovations of the industry. Their verbal and visual observations
capture an industry rooted in a rich past but constantly
evolving, embracing inventions in traffic control, track maintenance,
fuel efficiency (trains can move a tonne of freight almost
200 kilometres on a litre of fuel) and safety (see www.operationlifesaver.ca, for example).
Quite a few years ago, I saw the aftermath of a freight train
derailment at what was then an old, bumpy, worn-down railway
crossing close to Pete’s pizzeria. Crews were salvaging strewn rail
cars and scooping up spilled corn. But they didn’t stop there;
they completely rebuilt that crossing to robust, modern specs,
including embedded technology that can, within seconds,
detect a freight train idling where it shouldn’t.
Now, though, I think it’s time to heat up another slice of
my Locomotive. Maybe wash it down with a Steam Whistle.
— Eric Harris
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