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March/April 2006 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Titanic ice In-depth: On ice Feature: Dance of the dunlins Feature: Off the rails Feature: Being caribou The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

It was one of those sunny midsummer days with a Pacific blue sky — Aug. 5, 2005, to be exact. I was driving to Winnipeg along the Trans-Canada Highway, mountains ahead of me, the spires of Vancouver behind. Talk radio chattered in the background, but I found myself focusing, instead, on the poultry barns and farm labourers, dressed in yolkyellow jackets and bright red head scarves. Just as I began the long climb out of the Fraser Valley, I was forced from my reverie by a disturbing news report. Hours before, a CN train had derailed in the Cheakamus Canyon north of Squamish, B.C. It sounded like a bad one: A car carrying caustic chemicals had plunged into the river and spilled its load. I wondered whether I knew the crew members who had been on the train.

I pulled off the road near Hope and phoned John Holliday, the local chairman of the United Transportation Union who represents North Vancouver trainmen. Holliday and I worked together at BC Rail for 10 years before the Crown corporation was gobbled up by CN in 2004. I knew that if anyone could give me an accurate picture of what had happened up in the Cheakamus, it would be Holliday.

Although details of the wreck were still filtering in, Holliday told me the crew on duty early that morning had been hauling a long train of mostly empty cars north to be filled with British Columbia’s resource bounty of lumber, wood chips, sulphur, coal and petroleum products. A few of the tank cars were filled with sodium hydroxide, which is used to reduce forests to pulp and paper. One of them had jumped the tracks, bounced 12 metres down the embankment, ruptured and drained into the Cheakamus River just north of where it joins the Squamish River on its rush to the sea.

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