Royal Hudson locomotive No. 2860 at North Vancouver station before departure to Squamish in June 1996 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Oona Woods
Every town in the Sea to Sky Corridor is regularly affected by trains.
Squamish comes to a stand-still several times a day as those long, 150-car freight trains snake through the downtown district at 30 km/h. Whistler is startled by the whistle and Pemberton-Whistler commuters keep track of the time and boot it home to try and cross the tracks before the train adds minutes to their journey.
But apart from the tracks cutting through our consciousness the train-society is largely ignored, even though a whole community travels through the corridor daily and lives out its life in co-existence with us. They are engineers, conductors, bridge and track maintenance workers, stock pushers as well as stewards and servers.
These people are seeing our communities from a completely different perspective as they follow their path through the valleys. Generally speaking trains have a pretty bad reputation for attracting some of the more “Anorak”-focused trainspotter types of the world.
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