A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  Perhaps it boils down to spending all that time together. Maybe it’s the slow and easy rhythm. It could just be the sense of giddy unreality that comes from travelling across the land like a passenger on a cruise ship. Whatever it is, something about a train gentles the soul. Not just for the riders: seniors wave when we pass by. So do kids on bicycles and restaurant workers taking out the garbage.

  One of the riders asks why they’re going backward. Sometimes when asked this Jordan says he forgot his lunch or that his engineer’s hat blew out the window and they’re retracing their steps to find it. Jokes are made; laughs are had. The point is that the vibe remains undisturbed. Only then does Jordan start the trek back to the engine room.

  Occasionally he has to move aside to let passengers down the narrow corridor between the sleeping cars, the small lounge and the snack bar. Jordan chit-chats with a steward folding napkins in the back of the dining room. A trip’s on-train personnel depends on the customer count: a commuter train in the Ontario-Quebec corridor might have just one or two staff to look after travellers. On this trip twenty-six people are aboard the Canadian. Jordan passes half a dozen of them on the ten-minute walk back to the locomotive. Then he gets in his chair. It is time for the trip to really begin.

  A ROAD map of Ontario, crowded with towns and bisected with highways and roads, implies humanity’s crush. But the land empties out as the shining city of Toronto fades and the Canadian moves into some of the most iconic topography this country has to offer: the Group of Seven’s boreal forest, sandy beach and Precambrian rock; the thirty thousand islands that pock Georgian Bay, a body of water big enough to be considered the “sixth Great Lake.” A hundred and fifty years ago, when Ontario and Canada were going from hinterland to developed economy, the presence of a railway could bring a commercial boom to these towns that we pass—Midland, Port McNicoll and Victoria Harbour—and the ones where we briefly stop, like Washago and Parry Sound.

  I’ve got a series of mental images that surface whenever I think about trains: the first CPR locomotive chugging into a place like Pile of Bones—so called by the native Indians but soon renamed Regina and the first headquarters of the North West Mounted Police—on the Saskatchewan veldt. A family of newcomers from Ukraine staring gogglie-eyed out the window at the vastness of this country as they prepared to open up the Canadian West. A whiskered conductor on the British Columbia line wondering whether Billy Miner, Canada’s first train robber, would come swooping down at any moment.

  In my mind I see gaunt-faced Ordinary Joes, collars up and cloth caps pulled low against the cold, riding the rails to the hobo jungles that sprang up around the big cities during the Great Depression. I see cheering throngs lining the roadside in places with weird-sounding names like Beavermouth and Hope as King George VI and his bride, Queen Elizabeth, made their forty-four-day trip back and forth across the country. Just as I actually saw tear-streaked faces along the rural towns and farmlands when Pierre Trudeau’s casket made its slow way from Ottawa to Montreal to lie in state.

  To me, trains have always been wrapped up in big events; they’re about much more than getting from point A to point B. I understand that institutions have to be able to pay their own way. I realize that it is hard to justify a publicly owned rail line at a time when dead people sometimes sit undiscovered in hospital waiting rooms. But my heart sinks a little to think that someday the last train may haul ass across the arid prairie or through the primeval forest. That at some point in the not-too-distant future all the civility and joy will be squeezed from mass travel in this country. And all most of us will see of this vast land will be from thirty thousand feet in the air rather than almost at eye level, blasting through terrain otherwise untouched by man.

  On the main line, which tends to be straighter and better maintained than the feeder lines, Craig can let the throttle out a bit. Not too much, mind you. On a straight, wide-open stretch between Toronto and Montreal a train can hit a hundred when the engine is opened up. At that speed, a passenger train the size of the Canadian takes fourteen football fields to stop. Farther north, where the rail bucks and weaves, climbs and dips, the Canadian rarely tops fifty miles an hour. Smoothness, not speed, is the goal of the boys in the cab. Precision is required when the front section of the train is going down a grade and the back end is going up and the whole structure—as many as twenty-four cars during the busiest part of the summer season—is curving east or west.

  “The biggest part of being an engineer is knowing the road,” Craig says. By “road” he means landscape. One aptitude test for becoming an engineer is landmark recognition: candidates are shown an image of some terrain for a minute or so, then quizzed about what they remember. The easiest way to recall when something significant is about to happen to a section of track is to fix it in the memory with a landmark. “We use lakes,” says Craig. “We use streams and rivers. We use other things. There’s a ridge over the Key River that lets you know when you’re coming up to bridge and you’ll have to have the brake on. When you’re coming up to MacTier, the Highway 400 underpass lets you know that you have to slow down.”

  Knowing the road allows an engineer to react quickly and do the right thing at the right time: throttle up or down, apply the air brakes on each car of the train, hit the automatic brake if things have to happen really fast. The engineer wants to ensure the train is “spread out”—the cars far enough apart, the couplers with enough give—to limit the likelihood of something going wrong if anything unforeseen happens.

  Craig and Jordan do more than watch the scenery. If a foreman working on the track or an engineer on another train has a problem that the engineers of the Canadian need to know about, he tells them over the radio. Every fifteen miles or so, the train goes over a defect detector—a heat-measuring device that does a temperature reading of the train’s axles. If one is running too hot, Craig and Jordan will hear about that over the radio too.

  An engineer, it becomes obvious, is a multi-tasker, keeping an eye on the gauges and meters, watching the timetable, planning for switches, crossings and other trains. A quarter mile from every road crossing stands a marker: a white square with a black W on CN rail, a diamond with a black W on CP property. When Craig or Jordan sees one, they punch the horn button—two long blasts, one short and one long, with the last one carrying the train right through the crossing. They hit the horn if they’re near somewhere a crew might be working, or closing in on a bridge from which kids are known to dive into the river below.

  At night, far from any sign of humanity, they blast the whistle every time they come upon a particularly curvaceous section of rail. Animals like to run parallel to train tracks. Engineers turn their headlights off and blow their horns loudly in the hope that the animals will just veer off into the woods. But trains still demolish wolves, coyotes and bear. They wipe out deer, moose and elk. They annihilate lots of dogs. “When you come around a curve, you have no idea what will be there,” says Jordan. “Maybe rocks have fallen onto the track. Maybe a tree has been blown over. Because of the curve, you don’t notice it until you’re right up on it. Then you’ve got kind of a split decision to make. You’re going to hit it anyway. But we’re so much bigger than it is that we just plow through it and keep on going. Most of the time you don’t even feel anything back there unless it is something significant.”

  The truth is that when things go wrong around a train, they tend to go really wrong. People get distracted. Men make bad decisions. Because of the size of the machinery, working on the railroad is unforgiving. Craig and Jordan can rattle off a list of friends and co-workers who lost legs when pinned by freight cars and feet when run over by coal cars. Some were crushed to death; others died in fires.

  It’s safer in the locomotive, but shit still happens. Every year more than a hundred trains—many of them carrying passengers or dangerous goods—derail in Canada, because of faulty equipment or rails, an engineer losing control or a train hitting something that wasn’t supposed to be on a
track. Twenty-five years ago, twenty-three people died when a CN freight train and a Via passenger train collided head-on in Hinton, Alberta. An investigation found that human error caused the accident.

  Sometimes there’s just not much you can do. Every year about eighty people die “trespassing” on rail lines in this country. Transport Canada figures that about 10 percent of those deaths are clearly accidental. About 40 percent are obvious suicides. The rest fall somewhere in between: besotted men in ball caps who try to beat freight trains through crossings in their half-ton trucks; graffiti artists who choose to tag a rail underpass at the wrong time.

  “You can’t let it mess with you,” says Jordan. “But it does mess with your head.” A couple of years ago, he was working as a conductor on a trip along Lake Ontario. It was five in the morning and the sky was this incredible colour. Jordan was looking at the lake when he heard the engineer yell “Shit.” A woman lay sideways on the track Superman style—body straight, hands pointing forward. Her eyes locked on the engineer’s as the train roared toward her. “It’s the noise that sticks with you,” Jordan recalls, “like running over a bunch of hockey sticks. You could hear the wheel cut through the spine and hear the ballast [the gravel between the rails] being kicked up.”

  After the train stopped and the emergency call went out, Jordan’s job was to walk back and find the body. He discovered the torso about half a mile down the track. Jordan had walked past the lower half of her body. Along the way he nearly stepped on one of her kidneys, which lay by itself alongside the rail.

  UNLESS something is truly amiss, the engineer’s job is short on heart-pounding drama. Some of it is drudgery. When the Canadian makes its two scheduled stops on the run between Toronto and Capreol—at Washago and Parry Sound—Craig and Jordan get out and hoist the new passengers’ bags into the baggage car. Baggage handlers used to do that. But in the past twenty years railways have been doing more with less. The “fat” had to be cut.

  A lot of the work, therefore, is rote. So much so that staying awake while riding through a landscape you’ve seen hundreds of times can be a challenge. Locomotives used to feature a “dead man” pedal that had to be pressed down by the engineer’s foot at all times for the locomotive to function. It’s since been replaced by the Reset Safety Control—an alarm that requires the engineer to manually press a reset button at a regular time interval, dependent on speed. The alarm starts quietly at first and grows in intensity. As long as the engineer moves the throttle, uses the horn or applies the brakes the alarm remains untripped. But if, for example, Craig fell asleep at the throttle and the alarm was allowed to sound for twenty-five seconds straight, the power to the engine would shut off. The brakes would kick in. The train, in time, would come to a full, wrenching stop.

  Engineers, eager to prevent such a thing from ever happening, chug lots of coffee and drink lots of bathroom-break-inducing liquids. Lighting up a cigarette used to help keep guys awake in the days when you could smoke in a locomotive. Constant eating can also stave off boredom and sleep, which explains why packing on the pounds is another occupational hazard of the railway man.

  Mostly they talk to stay awake. They grouse about their employer. They gossip about co-workers, about who’s in trouble with the boss, who just had a heart attack and—increasingly, given the aging Via workforce—who’s got enough time in to retire. They lament the way the colourful oddballs who used to fill the ranks of the railway companies are retiring and dying off. They indulge in their particular form of gallows humour, which perhaps is best illustrated by the engineer who had hit an apparent suicide in the middle of a bridge.

  Just before impact the man on the track turned around and smiled, the engineer recounted in a post-accident debrief.

  “Then what did you do?” asked the investigator.

  “Well,” came the reply after a slight pause, “I wiped that fucking smile off of his face.”

  They talk about the game last night and the lady on the platform back at Union Station. Craig might wax on about his favourite mountain biking trail, Jordan his favourite ice-fishing spot. Sometimes they talk about music, since Craig is a drummer and Jordan likes to slap out some classic rock on the guitar.

  The only train song he plays is by Ozzy Osbourne, and really isn’t about trains at all. Knowing how many train songs are out there, I find that a little odd. One day I went looking online and found a collection of train-related songs compiled by Wes Modes, a California “sculptor, writer, performer, artist and mischief maker,” who among his many interests “hops freight trains and gets in trouble.” He had tallied up 550. His list includes “Midnight Special” (Creedence Clearwater Revival), “Engine Number 9” (Wilson Pickett), “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (Hank Williams), “Mystery Train” (Elvis Presley), “Love Train” (The O’Jays), “Peace Train” (Cat Stevens), “Marrakesh Express” (Crosby, Stills and Nash), “Midnight Train to Georgia” (Gladys Knight and the Pips), “I’m Moving On” (Hank Snow), “King of the Road” (Roger Miller), “Take the ‘A’ Train” (Duke Ellington), “Downbound Train” (Bruce Springsteen) and “Downtown Train” (the Mary Chapin Carpenter and Rod Stewart versions, but not the far superior one by Tom Waits, who wrote it).

  He lists songs by artists like Jimmie Rodgers, Boxcar Willie, and Flatt and Scruggs, who seemed to do little else but write songs about hobos. Old blues yellers—Lead Belly, Son House, Big Bill Broonzy, Bessie Smith—loved trains as much as pasty-faced longhairs like the Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead and Neil Young. A lot of the songs are about disasters. Others are about movement—a train along the tracks, a man leaving something or heading somewhere. A very high percentage of them are about loneliness and longing.

  One time I asked the late Toronto singer and guitar whiz Jeff Healey what it was about trains that engendered such great music. He talked about being a boy living in Brantford, Ontario, where he attended the local school for the blind, and the wistful feelings he experienced whenever the trains rolled past his dormitory. “I guess it’s about being young with an imagination and thinking about being on these trains, going somewhere but never really sure where you are going to end up.” Another time I asked Greg Leskiw, formerly of The Guess Who, if something about the train itself attracted rockers and bluesmen. “It’s like a train is a living thing,” said Leskiw, who by then lived in a house along the rail line in the south side of Winnipeg. “That rhythm builds and builds and it’s so musical that you could go anywhere with it.”

  If you listen selectively, you can hear the entire rise and fall of railroading captured in those songs. The first train song I can remember hearing was “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” by Gordon Lightfoot, which pretty much set the standard for the mythmaking school of train tunes in this country. A quarter of a century later, Hamilton’s Daniel Lanois wrote “Death of a Train”: “We don’t ride that train no more.”

  Craig and Jordan know railroading isn’t what it used to be—and that things are unlikely to get any better. They understand that they won’t be the last men to run a transcontinental train in this country. But they also realize that their breed is dying. They just shrug and go about their business. This job they have chosen is a way of life more than an occupation. It is no nine-to-five, home-in-time-to-get-the-kids-off-to-the-rink gig. The five-days-on-two-days-off shifts mean missed birthdays, dinners and other family Kodak moments. The uncertainty of the work schedule means friends simply stop calling after you back out of yet another barbecue invite at the very last minute. Always being on call means that you need to steal naps in the middle of the day when everyone else in your life is dying to do something, anything. No wonder the job is so hard on personal relationships: Jordan’s marriage ended in divorce; Craig lives alone. “You get a lot working on the railway in terms of comfortable income, benefits and pensions,” says Jordan. “But certain things get lost along the way.”

  Except I really don’t hear much regret in his voice. Jordan is the romantic of the duo—the guy who never wanted to be
anywhere other than in the locomotive, moving trains and people across this land. Craig, you get a sense, would have a far easier time doing something else as long as it kept him moving and engaged, mostly far from the city, in a way that involved big machines. Yet I want you to picture what I see at the end of their twelve-hour shift as we coast into the station at Capreol, where a crew change from Hornepayne awaits.

  They are, remember, a pair of middle-aged men who have been working on the railroad for nearly twenty years apiece. And Capreol long ago must have ceased being an exciting place to stop. Still, there they stood—eyes glazed wih fatigue, joints creaking, stomach churning from rotgut coffee. The air was cool enough for long sleeves, but morning had broken twenty minutes ago. As they climb out of the locomotive onto the walkway, Craig moves his neck like a boxer loosening up. Jordan looks at the brightening sky.

  “It’s a great day,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Craig says, “it’s a great day.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  HOLY SWEET MOTHER

  IN New Brunswick’s Westmorland County a woman in green coveralls, a red toque and a pair of silver studs in her right ear stands inside a barn. Her serenity is extraordinary. Not just because swallows dive-bomb her from overhead and it is frigid enough that her breath forms sleet. Or because the barn echoes with the moos of 106 roaming cows—ropes of mucus hanging from their nostrils, distended udders swinging like a listing ship’s chandeliers—overlaid with a noise like rain on a tin roof but that is actually torrents of manure and urine splatting on a concrete floor. No, I find the calmness of Dr. Jessica Harvey-Chappell impressive for this reason and this reason alone: I have seen athletes with seasons on the line, and watched police stand nose to nose with strikers. I have been in the room when politicians have told people who care that entire industries, probably their towns, are closing down. But never have I seen someone coolly trade farm-country gossip—what cows are yielding how much milk, who wants how much for what plot of land—while her arm is shoulder deep in the rectum of a dairy cow.