From Volume 14, Number 1 (2001-01) and Number 2
The afternoon of August 7, 1993, found me standing on the platform of an eighty-year-old station at Big Valley, Alberta. Built in 1912 by the Canadian Northern Railway when Big Valley was a thriving divisional point, it has now been beautifully restored to its original condition.
I had been invited by the Canadian Northern Historical Society to deliver an address to their annual Dominion Day meeting. My audience would consist of some 250 souls who would arrive from Stettler that afternoon on a steam excursion train operate by "Alberta Prairie Steam Tours" running on an abandoned CN branch line.
As the warm August sun beat down upon my shoulders, I was reflecting on the remarks I was about to give and the fact that my youngest grandson had recently helped me blow out the candles on my sixty-ninth birthday. I cam to the sobering realization that the time remaining in my allotted "three score years and ten" was diminishing at an alarming rate. Standing on the station platform, my eyes searching the far horizon for a tell-tale sign of smoke from a steam locomotive, only seemed to amplify the passing years and the subject I was about to address.
The tourist train chugged into Big Valley in due course and my audience detrained on the station platform. Time for me to begin.
Ladies and Gentlemen—It was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation to share with you a retrospective of growing up on the prairies as the son of a Canadian Northern locomotive engineer during the “Great Depression.”
With two sons of my own I am aware that raising a family in this day and age is a hazardous undertaking at best. My hope is that one day they will reflect on their old dad with the same regard that I have had for mine.
To set the stage for this dissertation I would like to share with you the prologue to a novel by James McCague written some years ago about the Indiana Valley Railroad, affectionately referred to as the Big Ivy. McCague’s opening words seem to capture in terms more eloquent than I am able, the environment in which I grew up.
The cemetery at East Bend, Indiana—the old part, with its rows of pitted slab headstones staggering tiredly out of line, defaced by time and desecrated by generations of birds—lies in a jog of the Hickory River, and the Big Ivy right of way crosses the trestle there and runs alongside.
It used to be that whenever an old mainline hogger was laid away, they’d time the ceremony so that the Ivy Flyer or the Fast Mail would whistle a requiem in passing. He’d be getting a wheel on his train and the smoke-stack would lay a rolling pall of smoke across the land. The long moaning of the whistle and the rolling rumble of steel on steel would drown out the minister’s last few words. The mourners would be reminded then that their departing brother was one who had regularly, through most of the days of his life, lived on terms of easy intimacy with danger, surrounded by the thrashing pound of iron, massively fashioned, breathing live steam, hurtling across the miles at his command faster than lesser men ever went their whole lives long.
It set him somehow apart. The machine age brought few enough heroes, and he was one, and if he had too often partaken of the fiery waters at Fallon’s Saloon, to the detriment of his family’s happiness and the public peace ... If his conversation had been studded with casual blasphemies, his will had been stubborn beyond belief, and his temper habitually carried a short fuse ... Well, what did all that amount to, against the fact that he had been a man among men.
And among the male mourners, as the train rolled swiftly into the distance, there’d be a small co-ordinated movement of biscuit thick watches coming out of pockets, of callused thumbs wiping across crystals, of bare heads nodding in satisfaction as eyes met with the murmured thought. "Gettin’ out right on time."
The scene portrayed by author McCague describes almost exactly the old cemetery beside the rail line in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where one William R. Bailey is laid away.
Bill Bailey was born in 1890 on a farm near Belmont, Manitoba. That year a Northern Pacific branch line was under construction from Morris to Brandon. The rail line was surveyed through a corner of the Bailey farm, so young Bailey was exposed to railroading at an early age. Canadian Northern took over the line from the NP in 1904, and by 1909 my dad had decided to abandon life on the farm. An older sister had married a section foreman on a recently constructed Canadian Northern branch line at Wakopa, Manitoba. Wakopa was the end of steel, and the way freight and extra trains tied up there. An engine watchman was required and young Bill, who could board with his sister in the section house, applied for and got the job.
About this time the Great Northern Railway in the U.S. was making incursions into Canada. A branch line was being constructed from Devils Lake, Minnesota, to Brandon. A railway diamond crossing and an interlocking tower was installed west of the Wakopa station and the engine watchman doubled as the towerman during the day. Despite his demanding duties, Bill managed to meet and court a prospective school teacher, the daughter of a local farmer. She eventually became my mother.
Bill Bailey qualified as a fireman in 1911 and as an engineman in 1913. Engineers were precluded from active service during the war years as Canadian Northern was hard pressed to keep up with wartime demands and a burgeoning construction schedule.
Mother and dad were married in 1919. They took their honeymoon trip to Vancouver on Canadian Northern’s Confederation Limited.
The old adage "Go west, young man" certainly applied in 1919. My mother was raised in an abstemious family and since Saskatoon was founded as a temperance colony it seemed like a good place to settle. I’m not too certain it had the desired result as far as her offspring were concerned.
I arrived on April 21, 1924, born in a modest bungalow with a midwife presiding. Our house was strategically located on the street railway line that led to Nutana yard. We did not have an automobile or a telephone in those days and call boys in the crew office were still in vogue.
By 1929 the telephone had arrived, and my first recollections of railway life began with a call from the crew clerk in the middle of the night for dad to take an extra west to Kindersley or the midnight mail to Regina. I would wait until the sound of his footsteps disappeared in the snow on the back porch and I would sneak in and occupy the warm spot he had vacated in bed beside my mother.
There were no radios or TVs in those days but we did have a wind-up Victrola gramophone. Dad had an affinity for railroad songs and I suspect I was weaned to the strains of Jimmy Rogers singing, "All around a water tank / standin’ in the rain / a thousand miles away from home / just waiting for a train."
Vernon Dalhart and Carson Robinson were the most prolific railroad singers of the day. It was intriguing a few years ago to visit the site where Steve Broady and "Old 97" left the rails on the trestle over Cherrystone Creek near Danville Tennessee. Sixty years previous I had worn out Vernon Dalhart’s recording of the incident.
In addition to railroad music my Dad had a keen appreciation of verse. He could recite Keats, Shelly, Tennyson and Kipling ad infinitum. I often wondered about this in as much as he had little formal education. I discovered his old Grad Four Alexandra reader in the basement one day. I then learned that they taught a lot more in grade four in 1900 than they do today. Another favourite poet of Dad’s was J.C. Stead, who compiled a volume in 1912 titled Songs of the Prairie. One of Stead’s poems, "A Prairie Heroine," became so implanted in my memory through countless repetition that it was instrumental in my pursuing a career in civil engineering.
One day when I was about six years old I heard my mother and father engaged in furtive conversation. The Great Depression had descended on the prairies. My dad had been cut off the spare board in Saskatoon. He packed a much larger suitcase than usual and kissed my mother goodbye.
Thereafter in the months and years to follow, the postman would deliver a succession of letters from such places as Rainy River, Brandon, Dauphin, Kamsack, Humboldt, Regina, and North Battleford. Some of these letters would contain a cheque, which Mother would rush over to the store to pay on our accumulating grocery bill.
During the summer months when I was on vacation from school, Mother would pack our bags and we too would embark on an odyssey that would include all those points previously mentioned.
We rode the day coaches and the way cars of assorted locals and passenger trains across the prairie to spend as much time with the old man as possible. Whenever I could I would accompany him on the locomotive, leaving Mother at the hotel. The recollections of those Canadian Northern divisional points are indelibly etched in my memory.
One such summer there was a flurry of activity in Radville, Saskatchewan, a minor Canadian Northern divisional point similar to Big Valley. As I recall, the old station at Radville was identical to the one at which we are gathered. Radville was located at the hub of four subdivisions. The Avonlea from Moose Jaw came down from the northwest and continued on through Radville southeast as the Lampman Subdivision. The Weyburn Subdivision arrived from the northeast and the Bengough Subdivision ran west to Willow Bunch.
There was a lot of activity, short-lived as it was in Radville that summer. In fact it is hard to imagine there were once thirty five crews set up on the spare board. The discovery of crude in Alberta had resulted in an oil movement down through Hanna, Dunblane, Moose Jaw to Radville and on through Lampman to Northgate en route to U.S. refineries. In addition there was a flurry of ranching west of Willow Bunch where the remnants of the old King ranch were fattening stock on the lush prairie grass. A stockman’s sleeper was set off No. 5 at Maryfield once a week and made its way down to Willow Bunch and return on a local passenger train.
The Carlton Subdivision, an obscure 56 km branch line ran northwest from Dalmeny near Saskatoon. During the 1930s there was freight service only as and when required, which wasn’t often. A light little Mogul locomotive, No. 414, was usually assigned to this run. After years of roaming around the prairies, cut back to a fireman’s position, my dad got called one day to take a Carlton Subdivision extra as the engineer. He took me with him and planted me on the jump seat ahead of the fireman. My dad was on the right-hand seat box and I couldn’t have been more proud if he were the king of England. The light 56 lb/yd (28 kg/m) rail lay somewhere beneath a sea of prairie grass across the right of way. As we made our way along about 16 km/h, the pilot of the 414 created a bow wave like the Mauritania in the North Atlantic.
On January 5, 1934, I acquired a baby brother. In those days there were no day-care institutions to deposit me while Mother was in the hospital. One night during this period Dad got called to fire a midnight freight to Regina. There was no alternative but to take me along. It was a bitterly cold night as we disembarked from the Exhibition streetcar at Nutana Yard. The "hogger" that night was a tough old rounder who looked askance at me when I showed up with my dad. Then the head-end brakeman staggered up to the engine; he was obviously suffering a tremendous hangover and the conductor had kicked him out of the caboose. He promptly climbed up and occupied the seat in front of the fireman and went to sleep. This was where I was meant to sit. Dad found an old caboose cushion and fixed me a seat on top of the water pail.
Engine 2818 was an ancient old hog with a Southern valve gear and a California cab. Only a canvas gangway curtain would keep out the blowing snow. It promised to be a long cold trip. The "hogger" was known to be a "rapper," a term used to describe an engineer who never seemed to get the Johnson bar hooked up properly. This was particularly stressful for the fireman, especially on a heavy grade, as there was coming up out of the Blackstrap Ravine on the Hanley Hill.
It was on occasions like this that the head-end brakeman usually got down to give the struggling fireman a hand. Not tonight though. That lazy s.o.b., sound asleep next to the warm back head didn’t wake up until we arrived at the yard limit at Regina. In the meantime Bill Bailey was down on the deck bailing coal into that hungry monster. I was freezing to death on the top of the water pail, but in the firebox glow I could see a patch of moisture appear on the back of Dad’s overall smock. I knew that the sweat off his back was running down the crack of his ass, but I never heard Dad make a disparaging remark about anybody even in circumstances like this.
We looked forward to the fall of the year and the annual grain rush to the Lakehead. If sufficient work occurred during that period and my father made a few extra runs we might make a train trip to Vancouver. I can recall crawling in between the starched linen sheets of the upper berth in the sleeping car and listening to the exhaust of a Mountain-class locomotive leading us along the canyons of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers.
My dad had an obsession about accepting welfare or relief of any kind. It was for this reason we saw so little of him during the Depression years. Whenever working out of Saskatoon, despite the fact that Mom would make a lunch twice as large as usual, he would oft times return home nearly famished after giving away his lunch to some poor hobo riding on the tender. We would constantly be treated to a succession of poor, wandering souls that Dad would befriend and bring home to share our already meagre rations. He would always insist on finding a task for them so they wouldn’t feel they were taking charity. Usually this work took the form of painting the storm windows. By the time the Depression was over those windows were so heavy I could barely lift them into place in the fall of the year.
The extremity of my universe in those years extended from Port Arthur, Ontario to Vancouver, B.C. In 1939 the dimensions of that universe expanded considerably and so did the railway business. All of a sudden there was a shortage of locomotive engineers, and the old man who had been on the tramp for the previous decade now found himself on a passenger run. No. 5 and 6 ran between Saskatoon and North Battleford. Two locomotives, 5130 and 5140, were assigned to the Regina to Edmonton portion of this run. They would remain with him for fifteen years.
In 1942 I joined the Navy. Dad and 5140 arrived in Saskatoon the evening I was to leave for overseas. It was winter on the prairie and No. 4, the train that would take me to Halifax, was hours late. Mother did not come down to the station in the middle of the night. Dad and I stood on the cold platform as No. 4 whistled for the 33rd Street diamond. He didn’t burden me with any fatherly advice—it was too late for that now.
When I returned at war’s end Dad and 5140 were still together. They remained so until Bill Bailey made his last run in 1955. Shortly thereafter a diesel appeared on the head end of No. 6, and 5140 like a dog without its master disappeared from the prairie forever.
I enrolled in university and with a degree in civil engineering began working for CN myself at the Western Regional headquarters in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In 1957, a couple of years after Dad had retired, a railroad friend of mine while vacationing in the Maritimes found 5140 languishing away in a ballast pit near Moncton, New Brunswick, awaiting the scrapper’s torch. Knowing my sentimental attachment, he borrowed a ball-peen hammer and a coal chisel and went out one night and removed the heavy brass number plate. It now occupies a prominent place of repose in the den of my home, a reminder of a great locomotive and the man who ran it. The golden age of steam spawned a particular breed of iron men to whom railroading was not so much an occupation but a whole way of life. I am proud to be an offspring of one of them.
During the time I was concluding my remarks to the Big Valley assembly, the Alberta Prairie engine crew had run around their train and positioned No. 41 for departure north to Stettler. In due course the conductor called out the traditional "all aboard" and my audience entrained accordingly. With two short whistle blasts and a cloud of smoke and steam the train moved slowly from the station. I listened to the laboured exhaust and the mournful wail of the whistle as the excursion train climbed north out of the big valley and disappeared in the distance. I was left alone once again to contemplate a scene reminiscent of a simpler, gentler, kinder time which regrettably will never ever return.