A Good Day's Work (4 page)

N
ORTH
from Toronto, through tracts of industrial land and suburbs, they made for the hard edge of the Canadian Shield. Past strip malls, telephone wires, barns, farmhouses and electrical transformers. Beyond cattle and scattered horses, homes where hard-working country folk slept and saloons where ne'er-do-wells lurked. From their perch in the glittering steel engineer's cab twenty feet above the standard-gauge rails, Craig Stead and Jordan McCallum have an unobstructed view of the frozen-in-time towns that snap by like postcards. The two men shift down and up. They hit buttons and pull levers. They talk into microphones and to each other. They look. They listen. They sound the horn. A couple of hoggers on the night train. Running the
varnish into the black as the land changes from gentle plain to upturned granite.

Three hours ago their train hissed like a prehistoric beast in the rail yard of Toronto's Union Station. The Canadian tonight has eighteen cars plus the locomotive, each of them roughly twenty-five metres long. That makes the train shorter than the CN Tower then looming over its right flank but still four football fields in length. Plenty of room, in other words, to carry the 172 passengers waiting inside, amidst the Belle Époque opulence of Union Station, to Pacific Central Station in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The last time I was at Union Station, in the early 1990s, it was alive with humanity: commuters grabbing the GO train; jacked-up merchant bankers eager to spend their spoils in the alehouses of Yorkville; weary secretaries bound for the peace and quiet of the burbs. It was Toronto, so no one lost it completely. But people shoved and ran. Voices were raised.

Not like tonight. Granted, 8:30 p.m. is long past rush hour, and a lot of the traffic through the station is subway riders anyway. Still, I take it as symptomatic that in the busiest rail transportation hub in the country I can see only a smattering of humans amid the Missouri stone walls, the Tennessee marble floors, the Bedford limestone columns. Railways built this country. Confederation would never have happened without the Canadian Pacific Railway: British Columbia made a transcontinental railway a condition for joining the country. On the opposite coast, Prince Edward Island was only lured in when John A. Macdonald agreed to assume the huge debt from the island's own ill-fated railway scheme and promised a communications link to the mainland.

Before the CPR's completion Canada was a string of unconnected settlements separated by huge expanses of forest and prairie. The snort and hiss of the locomotive and the feats of the rail line's civil engineers—the 94.2-metre-high bridge traversing Alberta's Oldman River, the eight-kilometre tunnel through the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia—became a shining symbol of what this new country could accomplish. The CPR tied the country together “like a line of steel from coast to coast,” Pierre Berton, the author of
The National Dream
and
The Last Spike
told me once. “Our cities and towns popped up along it like beads on a string. Without it we would have developed vertically rather than horizontally. We became the nation we are because of the railroad.”

But that was before two-car families and long-haul jets that could make it coast to coast without refuelling. People stopped taking the train. Freight, especially bulk commodities, became the dominant railway service. Built to create a nationwide passenger carrier similar to Amtrak in the United States, Via Rail Canada gradually assumed all of the country's main rail passenger services. But successive federal governments slashed funding. Twenty years ago Via cut its passenger network in half, axing some of its most crowd-pleasing runs. Today most of Via's traffic is on the commuter run in the Windsor-Quebec corridor. Even freight carriers have been closing stops in smaller cities to boost profit margins.

Still running, though, is Via's flagship train, a replica of the original Canadian, which made its first trip in 1955 and has been refurbished to harken back to the great age of rail. Its 2,775-mile route takes in most of Canada's scenic panorama. Who knows for how long in this age of quicker is better and
everything must pay its way. That's why I was in the all-but-empty grandeur of Union Station, joining the trickle of passengers pushing luggage carts and pulling wheeled suitcases toward the check-in counter: the Asian tourists, the middle-aged woman with the T- shirt that said Don't Piss Me Off, the chunky brunette sporting a Swimmers Do It Better In The Water top, the trim old dude in a trilby and a tartan tie. Nobody—particularly not the guy with the middle part in the short-sleeved dress shirt who looks unnervingly like Dwight Schrute—is cool. They're mostly white and getting up there: men in sensible pants with elastic waists up around their nipples, ladies with plaster of Paris perms.

Maybe it's the anticipation of a transcontinental trip on one of the world's great passenger trains—perhaps it's happy hour at the Panorama Lounge—but they're also, to a person, exceedingly happy. Giggling, goofing around, their laughter ricocheting down the corridor. That makes them starkly different from the average wretched air traveller. This, in my view, is perfectly understandable. The trains run on time. A seagull never gets sucked into a diesel locomotive engine, causing the train to begin a death spiral five miles above the earth. At a train station no homeland security type stands before you, working his fingers into a rubber glove in anticipation of a body-cavity search. Instead a crinkly-eyed Québécois dude flirts with the ladies as he takes tickets and gets everyone organized.

At 9:30 p.m. they're allowed out into the yard: the “foamers” so ardent in their love for locomotion that they are alleged to foam at the mouth at the site of their favourite diesel train; travel buffs starting their first transcontinental rail trip; sufferers from fear of flying; maybe even a romantic or
two looking for the kind of adventure that befalls men in tuxes and women in chiffon dresses aboard locomotives in Alfred Hitchcock movies. Every train I can remember being on also has its share of passengers susceptible to nostalgia for the sort of fabled, innocent past conjured up in Gordon Lightfoot songs and vintage Canadian National posters. People like that board the train vibrating with possibility. I know I do.

THREE days earlier Jordan McCallum walked over to the fridge in his Dundas, Ontario, bungalow. As a locomotive engineer who works the “spare board,” he's the low man on the totem pole. Instead of a regular shift, he's on call seven days a week. It works this way: there's a list; first name in is first name out. As people are called out on the job, names rise on the list. Jordan gets two hours' notice when they want him to come to work. Back in the old days there were crew callers: junior guys who would jump on their bicycles, ride over to your house, knock on your door and give you your work assignment. Now someone just dials your cell phone.

“You can make the spare board work for you,” says Jordan in a chipper voice, which I discover is his usual mode of communication. “If you're going to work with someone consistently, it's almost like a marriage. I like the variety. I like working with different people. It keeps it fresh. For me, until I have the seniority to hold a certain run, it just works.”

So, he opened the fridge, grabbed his soft-sided lunch bag and threw in some icepacks for the sandwiches. Then he walked outside, got into his black Ford Escape and drove the
sixty kilometres to the CN shipping yard in Mimico, in the southwestern part of Toronto, where he boarded a train for London. The next day he worked back to Toronto. A day later he awoke at the Comfort Inn on the outskirts of Sudbury, then took a cab over to the railroad town of Capreol, where Craig Stead—who he has shared a locomotive cab with on and off for fifteen years—had just arrived in his burgundy pickup. “When I started out, the Canadian's engineers were always old guys close to retirement,” says Craig in his gravelly rasp. “They call the Canadian the ‘varnish job.' When you're the engineer on the Canadian, you're ‘running the varnish.' It was usually the reward for a long career. Guys like Jordan and me lucked out. All the baby boomers are retiring now. We know it's a great privilege to be an engineer on the Canadian.”

At about 10 a.m. on June 9, 2010, they pulled the Canadian into CN's Mimico switching yard. They did their final checks. They grabbed their gear. Then they took a cab to the Marriott Hotel in downtown Toronto, where they snoozed, watched some tube and got a bite. By 7:30 p.m. they were back at Mimico, printing two sets of documents—their tabular bulletin general orders—off of the computer.

These orders let them know about washed-out track, broken rail or any other reason to watch their speed in the trip to come. Once they have a clear understanding of the route they call the controller and tell him that he can “release the train.” Then they grab some earplugs and hand wipes and walk out into the clamour of the switching yard in the direction of locomotive 6412, one of Via's fifty-three F-40 class of locomotives.

It takes around fifteen minutes, backing up at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour, to travel from Mimico to the
spaghetti bowl of tracks at Union Station. They pull into the east end of the yard. There Craig applies the handbrake and takes out the reverser, the train's “key,” so the pair can head for the yardmaster's office to kill some time as the crew readies the train for its passengers.

The Canadian is an impressive hulk. The snub-nosed, twenty-year-old locomotive, with its three thousand horsepower that allows it to hit almost a hundred miles an hour; the swanky dome car and linen-service dining car where Hercule Poirot might have supped; the sleepers where you can choose from a berth like the one Marilyn Monroe climbed into with Tony Curtis in
Some Like It Hot
; the private bedrooms where you're dispatched to sleep by a motion that's partway between a rocking chair and some air turbulence. The lines are clean, the edges rounded rather than geometric. The overall look is comfortable, elegant and retro—not like those mean-looking bullet trains that rocket through Japan and much of Europe.

The thrice-weekly Toronto-to-Vancouver trip takes eighty-seven hours. Since Transport Canada prohibits engineers from working longer than twelve hours per shift, the journey requires nine crew changes. The two men entrusted with the first leg of the journey are dark-haired and of medium height, with the sunless pallor of people whose ancestors migrated to Canada from the British Isles. With nearly forty years on the trains between them, they almost certainly have the railway man's habitual gimpy knees—from all that jumping in and out of rail cars—as well as the progressive hearing loss that comes from working with a train horn mounted a few feet over your head.

They're in uniform: blue ball hats with Via Rail emblazoned in yellow writing. (The traditional hickory-striped
engineer's hats pretty much disappeared with the steam era.) They wear blue shirts and pants. (Only the freight guys over at CN and the guy in the Village People wear the striped engineer's overalls.) Both Jordan and Craig sport dark workboots—Mark's Work Wearhouse, eight inches high with a steel toe and safety shank underneath—and railway-approved Bulova watches. The most striking things the two men have on are orange-and-yellow safety vests.

They travel light: lunches, shaving kits, a change of underwear, socks, maybe another T-shirt. Via engineers must always carry a rules card, which states that they are qualified to drive a train and lists any minor physical infirmities, like the need to wear glasses. They also are never without their Via rule books, timetables and locomotive operating instructions.

What you won't find anywhere on their person is a cell phone or iPod. There was a time—long before either of these two worked their first trip—when the task of a junior man on a crew included a run to the liquor store before the shift started and, sometimes, lifting a shit-faced engineer onto the train. But not today. Nothing that distracts is ever allowed in the engineer's cab. Between the two of them Jordan and Craig have done this run hundreds of times. Their eyes are peeled. Their ears are open. Their minds are standing by. A train as long as a small town is in their care. Attention will be paid.