by John Demont
At 9:30 p.m. they’re allowed out into the yard: the “foamers” so ardent in their love for locomotion that they are alleged to foam at the mouth at the site of their favourite diesel train; travel buffs starting their first transcontinental rail trip; sufferers from fear of flying; maybe even a romantic or two looking for the kind of adventure that befalls men in tuxes and women in chiffon dresses aboard locomotives in Alfred Hitchcock movies. Every train I can remember being on also has its share of passengers susceptible to nostalgia for the sort of fabled, innocent past conjured up in Gordon Lightfoot songs and vintage Canadian National posters. People like that board the train vibrating with possibility. I know I do.
THREE days earlier Jordan McCallum walked over to the fridge in his Dundas, Ontario, bungalow. As a locomotive engineer who works the “spare board,” he’s the low man on the totem pole. Instead of a regular shift, he’s on call seven days a week. It works this way: there’s a list; first name in is first name out. As people are called out on the job, names rise on the list. Jordan gets two hours’ notice when they want him to come to work. Back in the old days there were crew callers: junior guys who would jump on their bicycles, ride over to your house, knock on your door and give you your work assignment. Now someone just dials your cell phone.
“You can make the spare board work for you,” says Jordan in a chipper voice, which I discover is his usual mode of communication. “If you’re going to work with someone consistently, it’s almost like a marriage. I like the variety. I like working with different people. It keeps it fresh. For me, until I have the seniority to hold a certain run, it just works.”
So, he opened the fridge, grabbed his soft-sided lunch bag and threw in some icepacks for the sandwiches. Then he walked outside, got into his black Ford Escape and drove the sixty kilometres to the CN shipping yard in Mimico, in the southwestern part of Toronto, where he boarded a train for London. The next day he worked back to Toronto. A day later he awoke at the Comfort Inn on the outskirts of Sudbury, then took a cab over to the railroad town of Capreol, where Craig Stead—who he has shared a locomotive cab with on and off for fifteen years—had just arrived in his burgundy pickup. “When I started out, the Canadian’s engineers were always old guys close to retirement,” says Craig in his gravelly rasp. “They call the Canadian the ‘varnish job.’ When you’re the engineer on the Canadian, you’re ‘running the varnish.’ It was usually the reward for a long career. Guys like Jordan and me lucked out. All the baby boomers are retiring now. We know it’s a great privilege to be an engineer on the Canadian.”
At about 10 a.m. on June 9, 2010, they pulled the Canadian into CN’s Mimico switching yard. They did their final checks. They grabbed their gear. Then they took a cab to the Marriott Hotel in downtown Toronto, where they snoozed, watched some tube and got a bite. By 7:30 p.m. they were back at Mimico, printing two sets of documents—their tabular bulletin general orders—off of the computer.
These orders let them know about washed-out track, broken rail or any other reason to watch their speed in the trip to come. Once they have a clear understanding of the route they call the controller and tell him that he can “release the train.” Then they grab some earplugs and hand wipes and walk out into the clamour of the switching yard in the direction of locomotive 6412, one of Via’s fifty-three F-40 class of locomotives.
It takes around fifteen minutes, backing up at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour, to travel from Mimico to the spaghetti bowl of tracks at Union Station. They pull into the east end of the yard. There Craig applies the handbrake and takes out the reverser, the train’s “key,” so the pair can head for the yardmaster’s office to kill some time as the crew readies the train for its passengers.
The Canadian is an impressive hulk. The snub-nosed, twenty-year-old locomotive, with its three thousand horsepower that allows it to hit almost a hundred miles an hour; the swanky dome car and linen-service dining car where Hercule Poirot might have supped; the sleepers where you can choose from a berth like the one Marilyn Monroe climbed into with Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot; the private bedrooms where you’re dispatched to sleep by a motion that’s partway between a rocking chair and some air turbulence. The lines are clean, the edges rounded rather than geometric. The overall look is comfortable, elegant and retro—not like those mean-looking bullet trains that rocket through Japan and much of Europe.
The thrice-weekly Toronto-to-Vancouver trip takes eighty-seven hours. Since Transport Canada prohibits engineers from working longer than twelve hours per shift, the journey requires nine crew changes. The two men entrusted with the first leg of the journey are dark-haired and of medium height, with the sunless pallor of people whose ancestors migrated to Canada from the British Isles. With nearly forty years on the trains between them, they almost certainly have the railway man’s habitual gimpy knees—from all that jumping in and out of rail cars—as well as the progressive hearing loss that comes from working with a train horn mounted a few feet over your head.
They’re in uniform: blue ball hats with Via Rail emblazoned in yellow writing. (The traditional hickory-striped engineer’s hats pretty much disappeared with the steam era.) They wear blue shirts and pants. (Only the freight guys over at CN and the guy in the Village People wear the striped engineer’s overalls.) Both Jordan and Craig sport dark workboots—Mark’s Work Wearhouse, eight inches high with a steel toe and safety shank underneath—and railway-approved Bulova watches. The most striking things the two men have on are orange-and-yellow safety vests.
They travel light: lunches, shaving kits, a change of underwear, socks, maybe another T-shirt. Via engineers must always carry a rules card, which states that they are qualified to drive a train and lists any minor physical infirmities, like the need to wear glasses. They also are never without their Via rule books, timetables and locomotive operating instructions.
What you won’t find anywhere on their person is a cell phone or iPod. There was a time—long before either of these two worked their first trip—when the task of a junior man on a crew included a run to the liquor store before the shift started and, sometimes, lifting a shit-faced engineer onto the train. But not today. Nothing that distracts is ever allowed in the engineer’s cab. Between the two of them Jordan and Craig have done this run hundreds of times. Their eyes are peeled. Their ears are open. Their minds are standing by. A train as long as a small town is in their care. Attention will be paid.
THE engineer climbed into the cab first: round face, half beard that could be made of sand, a build like a decent junior league defenceman fifteen years after the last puck was dropped. Craig Stead, focused yet friendly, thirty-nine, grew up in Capreol, four hundred kilometres north of Toronto. There a person worked for one of two employers: the mining companies, which harvested some of the world’s largest nickel and copper deposits. Or the mighty Canadian National Railway, which, when Craig was growing up there, sent thirty trains daily thundering across the tracks spanning Capreol’s main street. Although Craig was the son of a mining company payroll clerk, his plans were a little different: after successive high school summers working for Ontario Hydro, he hoped to go to university to study electrical engineering. Instead, after high school he signed on as a CNR heavy equipment operator to earn tuition. He then spent the next six years servicing CN trains and rail lines throughout northern Ontario. “I kind of fell into railroading,” he says. “By that point a lot of friends were finishing university. I had enough money saved up. But they were working for peanuts. I was hooked on the money. I decided to stick with it.”
A restless guy who downhill-ski-raced in high school, Craig wasn’t going to be content driving a crane forever. He transferred over to the “running trades,” taking a job out of Niagara Falls as a conductor on the CN freight trains between Buffalo and Toronto. On freight trains conductors are the bosses. They look after the paperwork, operate the switch that allows the train to be guided from one track to another at a railway junction and perform a host of other
duties. Eventually Craig moved to Toronto; then, tired of the big-city hustle, he took a transfer to the hamlet of Hornepayne, literally a thousand kilometres northward. The boredom kicked in again. “I wanted a change. I wanted to see a different side of things.” So he signed up for engineer’s training, which, once you pass the various aptitude tests, consists of two weeks of instruction in a locomotive simulator in a large mobile trailer.
Craig took a transfer back to Capreol, because of its proximity to Sudbury and its importance as a rail terminus, a more sought-after posting than isolated Hornepayne. But CN in his view wasn’t what it once was. Before long Craig signed on to operate heavy equipment and run trains on the eighty miles of track at Inco’s Sudbury nickel operation. When the mine went on strike, he heard Via was looking for an engineer to work out of Capreol aboard the Canadian. “I can’t tell you how boring it was at Inco,” he says. “I wasn’t being challenged. I wasn’t really using my skills. The job at Via was an opportunity to get back on the main line. I always wanted to be an engineer on the Canadian. So, I jumped at it.”
The assistant engineer gets in next. At thirty-seven, he has a schoolboy’s red cheeks and complexion. Craig, the pragmatist, may have taken to railroading mostly for the steady work and good paycheque. Jordan, slightly shorter and lighter, seemed to come out of the womb hankering for the touch of the throttle and the sound of the whistle. He grew up in Goderich, Ontario, but often spent summer vacations in Ottawa, where his grandfather had worked his way up to be CN Express’s assistant terminal manager. The old guy was retired by then, but still liked to go have coffee with his cronies at the station. Often he brought his grandson along.
“I remember the first time I ran a locomotive,” Jordan says. “I was eleven and the train had just come in from Montreal. They would cut the engine, uncouple it, then run up and fuel it and attach it to the night train—a two-car that would connect in Brockville with the rest of the train—then go right through to Toronto. I pulled the throttle. I released the brake. I rang the bell. I don’t want to stay that it was magical. But you could do stuff then that would be off-limits nowadays. It was pretty awe-inspiring.”
In school Jordan used to draw doodles of trains when he should have been thinking about the Treaty of Utrecht. On vacation he would go down to the end of his grandparents’ street and peer through the chain-link fence at the trains on the way to the nearby station. Since he had memorized the timetable, he just had to look at his watch to know which train was passing. “I liked the sound, the smell. I liked the sense of possibility,” he says. “When you go on a train, you go on a journey, and you never know what might unfold. I feel that way to this day. The excitement of departing on time and getting everyone where they are trying to go.”
Because he grew up in the eighties and early nineties—when rail’s day was already clearly done—people gave him funny looks when he confided his dream of following in Casey Jones’s footsteps. To this day he has a thick stack of rejection letters from railroads throughout North America. Discouraged, he started punching the clock at a tavern in Goderich. On a whim, he sent out one last application. On January 4, 1994—Jordan has the date memorized—the phone rang. The Alberta Prairie Railway and Central Western Railway out of Stettler, Alberta, wanted summer help. Two weeks later he got another call: the Goderich-Exeter Railway in Goderich needed someone to help clean up the snow on its rail lines.
Jordan did that for a few months. In early April he jumped in his car. Three days later he arrived in Stettler. Home was an apartment on the second floor at the Big Valley, Alberta, train station. Jordan lived there for six months, sharing digs with another railroad man. During the day he kept his mouth shut and eyes and ears open and absorbed what he could from old-timers who started working the rails during the age of steam.
Mostly he worked on the freight short line—taking empty grain cars, waiting for them to be filled, then picking up the loaded cars and getting them to market. Sometimes, on weekends, he worked on the steam tourist train that made short excursions through the area. Six months later he was back in Ontario, getting his engineer’s certification and starting a long run at CN Rail—toiling in the yards and as a trainmaster before going back on the trains as a conductor and engineer through British Columbia and Alberta and across most of Ontario. Then in 2009 a job opened up at Via Rail.
IT’S comfortable up in the locomotive cab: plenty of headroom, warm enough for short sleeves, big enough for three grown men not to get in one another’s way. A well-lit room with the overheads, the cream-coloured walls and the illuminated dials and buttons. Noisy without tearing a hole in the tympanum. A pair of nice ergonomic chairs that pivot for a 270-degree view of the passing landscape through the bridge windows.
When sitting in the chair, the engineer can move the throttle—a little lever with a black knob on the end—up and down. He can flip the valve that pushes compressed air through the brake system. Craig shows me the dynamic braking a arrangement that acts as a backup if the air brakes fail or the train hits an overly steep downgrade. He points out the power for the passenger area at the back of the train. Next to the throttle is the button he and Jordan punch to sound the horn.
Let me say right here and now that I like slang, the jargon of subcultures. Railway men have some of the best. Locomotives are called “hogs,” which means engineers are called “hoggers” in central Canada and “hogheads” out west. In the Maritimes they’re called “drivers,” even though engineers don’t technically “drive” a train—they “run” it. A caboose, when they still had cabooses, used to be called a “van,” “crumbie” or “hack.” Car men—those mechanics responsible for repairing and maintaining railway cars—were “car knockers” because they would frequently tap the underside of a freight car with a hammer, listening for defects. A conductor is sometimes called the “conny”; a switch man in a yard is a “yard ape” or “switch bitch.” A “dinger” is a yardmaster. A machinist is a “knuckle splitter.”
Years ago, railway crews were assigned a specific amount of work. The sooner you got it done, the sooner you went home. This was called working for the “cut-out.” A “hose bag” is the line that supplies the air for the air brake system. “Do up the bags” means to connect the air line on the cars. “Tie it down” means putting a handbrake on the car to secure it. A train’s maximum allowable speed is a “highball.” If there’s an accident, the investigation by supervisors is called “talking to the typewriter.” “Running the varnish” means working on passenger trains, since they used to be given a fresh coat of varnish each year. Passenger trains, in fact, seem to be the subject of particular mockery: in some places a “baby lifter” is a passenger train brakeman. A “cushion rider” is a passenger train conductor. The electricity on passenger trains is known as “hotel power.”
The Canadian’s engines, like those of every Via locomotive, never shut off during fixed stopovers. That makes for a surprisingly quick getaway when the passengers are all aboard: Ivan, the service manager—the person who runs everything outside of the locomotive now that conductors have vanished in the cutbacks—gives them a quick briefing, they run a brake check, then switch the power from standby to normal.
Just before departure the phone rings. Craig listens, then hangs up. “There’s a little problem,” he says. “One of the passengers uses a breathing apparatus. His berth is too far from an electrical outlet for the cord to reach. Do we have an extension cord?” They puzzle about this for a minute or so until Jordan radios one of the yard control towers and lines up an extension cord that they can pick up on the way out of the yard. It is 9:57 when they radio the tower and say they’re ready to go, on time, at 10 p.m. They get the all-clear. Jordan takes off the handbrake. Craig, eyes agleam, throttles up. The Canadian inches forward. The momentum of more than fourteen hundred tons is as absolute as that of a glacier.
The rail is standard gauge, which means that the distance between the inside edges of the rails is 4 feet 8½ inches. Most o
f the world’s railroads, whether in Miami, Florida, or Novosibirsk, Siberia, are standard gauge. The United States—with 224,000 kilometres—has the largest railway system in the world. Russia (87,000 km) is next, followed by China (86,000 km) and India (63, 000 km). Then comes Canada with some 46,000 kilometres, more than enough rail to circle the earth.
Rail still matters in this country. Canadian freight trains still move grain, coal, forest products and fertilizer materials from the west. From the east they transport minerals from mines and cars from auto plants. Almost all of that happens on rail lines controlled by the Canadian National Railway—which owns or leases 23,000 kilometres of railways—and Canadian Pacific Rail, which has some 13,000 kilometres of rail. Via passenger trains like the Canadian run almost exclusively on CN and CP track.
For identification’s sake, track is split into subdivisions. After leaving the Union Station corridor, the Canadian travels along the Weston subdivision for a few kilometres before switching onto the Newmarket subdivision. Until fifteen years ago the Canadian used to be able to go straight up to Parry Sound on this line. Then cutbacks forced CN to streamline its rail network. Craig zigs, then zags the train until it is on a connecting track bound for Muskoka, Ontario’s cottage country. Then he backs the train up to reconnect to another line so they can resume the journey north.
On foot Jordan supervises the operation at the end of the train. Afterward he climbs aboard and enters the train’s park car, so-called because the cars are always named after a Canadian national park. People spend small fortunes to sit in these glass-domed cars as they ride across the country. Though midnight is near, a handful of them are up, having a glass of wine in the communal lounge area. Jordan and Craig don’t get a chance to interact much with passengers. They’ve seen enough to know that people change once they’re aboard a train. They loosen up. The tightness in their shoulders disappears. They volunteer intimate information easily to total strangers.
