The whistles and the rattling and the rhythmic clacking.

Sonja's love of trains did not begin with "The Polar Express".  She and Peter were walking Jett in the park one evening when Peter heard the E&N train whistle as it wound its way in to Victoria.  The tracks pass by a few blocks beyond the northern border of the park, so we can always hear it leaving town in the morning and coming back in the evening.  Peter asked Sonja if she could hear the train and she stopped and listened and heard it.  Something clicked.  She was very excited when Peter said she could watch some videos of trains when they got home.  Sonja practically burst through the door, demanding to watch trains.  She spent the next hour or so watching train videos on YouTube on Peter's laptop.  She was absolutely riveted and loved hearing all the train whistles.  


For the next few weeks, Sonja watched train videos pretty regularly and I always searched for videos with steam locomotives, since they are so beautiful and impressive, with very loud, satisfying whistles.  There are thousands of train videos on YouTube, posted by some pretty dedicated train enthusiasts.  The most devout videographers are those who film steam locomotives.  These folks spend a lot of their time hunting down and taping trains and you can often tell from their videos that it is a labour of love.  During the time that Sonja was train-crazy, I owed them a debt of gratitude.  Not only for her but also for me, because I love trains too.

I grew up in White Rock BC, a town known for it's seaside railway tracks.  I heard an interview with a man on the radio recently about seaside railways and he said it is not very common to have a seaside railway run through a populated area because of safety concerns.  Makes sense, but when I was little, I couldn't have imagined my life without those tracks and the trains they carried.  

From between the ages of about three and six, I lived in a house that was literally a gravel parking lot away (albeit a very large gravel parking lot) from the train tracks and the beach.  The house was also flanked by huge parks.  Yeah, it was a child's dream home.  I remember mornings being awake with the sun and running, so excited, to wake my Mom and tell her that the train was going by.  My poor Mom.  I've posted this pic before, but this is me on the deck of our place, with the parking lot, tracks and beach beyond:

I can't even guess how many pennies I laid on those tracks as a kid.  My brother Phil and I would lay down the coins while the train approached, run for cover, wait for the train to pass (this could take awhile - sometimes I would give up counting the cars once the number got higher than one hundred), and then scour the rocks next to the tracks to find the flattened, elongated, shining remains.  I remember some old guy yelling at me once, saying I was going to derail the train.  No train I've ever heard of has been derailed by a coin and I told him so.  I didn't tell him that we had also put rocks on the tracks over the years; those rocks made an incredible popping/banging noise when they exploded under the crushing wheels of the trains.  I kept putting pennies on the tracks until I was an adult.  I think the last time I laid a coin on the tracks was when I was around twenty.  I would do it again right now, today, if I could.  When I was still living with my Mom, I had around ten flattened pennies hanging out in a box on top of my dresser.  I wish I still had them.


My favourite place to watch the trains when I was a kid was from the top of the ladders attached to the railway lights interspersed alongside the tracks.  I don't think I was supposed to climb those rickety ladders and I remember a couple engineers shaking their heads at me as I gripped the thin metal railing with one hand and waved at them with the other, the tiny metal platform rattling underneath my feet.  Another thing I would do right now if I could.

The trains heading south through town always had to stop at the Canada-US border, which was only a few kilometres away, and since some of those trains were over a hundred cars long, some of those stopped trains stretched back along White Rock beach.  As a teenager, my friends and I would sometimes go down to the tracks at night and climb up onto the train cars.  It was fun and thrilling to clamber over the cars before they lurched into movement again.  They always moved very slowly when they sarted up again, and sometimes we would ride the cars for a few hundred metres, clinging to the outside ladders before jumping off and walking back.

When I moved away from White Rock when I was twenty-two, I was surprised at how much I missed the sounds of the train.  I missed the whistles and the rattling and the rhythmic clacking.  I missed the countless times I would see the train while waiting for a bus, or walking to work.  The trains are such an integral piece of my childhood puzzle and it's no wonder that in the end, I ended up watching far, far more train videos on YouTube than Sonja ever did.  If you have any interest in trains, you should watch a few too, some of them are awesome.


Here is a video of a train I was lucky enough to see come through White Rock when I was a kid (although this video is not in White Rock), Canada' famous steam locomotive the Royal Hudson:

After Sonja got her cast off this summer, Peter, Sonja, Haven, Joyanna, Sonja's cousins Mia and Jaidon, and I went on a small-scale steam locomotive south of Duncan.  Sonja was stoked:

**The only photos I can take credit for are the one of me as a kid and all the pics of my family.  All the other photos and the video were found online.**