A train ride

Both of my grandfathers worked on trains.  My father's father was a postal worker who sorted mail on trains, while my mother's father rose to the position of conductor. (During the Great Depression both of them occasionally brought home a hobo and gave him a square meal.) In my childhood we could often hear the distant horn of a train.

 

I remember when we took the train to visit my grandparents when I was six or seven. (We lived in Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick, while they lived in Campbellton on New Brunswick's north shore near Quebec.) The detail I recall is that you could get water in these cone-shaped paper cups.

I've travelled on the train between the Maritimes and central Canada several times.  When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa and met our local M.P., fisheries minister Romeo Leblanc.  And when I was seventeen, my brother and I took the train to Montreal where I took the specialized S.A.T. exams. (My subjects were mathematics, history and Latin.) We stayed at a youth hostel.

In the late 1980s there was a time when I was going to university in Halifax, and often took the train back to Sackville.  That train route included a nice scenic stretch through the Wentworth Mountains.  Someday I want to see the Prairies and B.C. by train, or maybe even Siberia!

If you ask me, we need to get fewer people in cars and planes, and more on trains, which are more fuel-efficient.  I have a feeling that when I'm older I'll wish I'd ridden the train more often.