Working on the railroads (Part 1) The Early Years

Photo: Thornton Yard (Surrey, B.C., Canada)

A life on the railroads began for me in the northern summer of 1972. I had just finished high school in June. My late uncle was a very senior man with Canadian National, was based in Winnipeg and the liaison officer with the Canadian Wheat Board. It was a big job coordinating shipments and delivery protocols with the grain producers and the ports across the nation. He was in Vancouver, where I grew up and in Grade 12 at the time, on company business and asked me about my plans for the summer and beyond. I really had none.

Fact is, I wasn’t interested in post-secondary education but gave it lip service admittedly to keep the folks satisfied. Uncle asked - how about a job on the railway and I said sounds good. Next thing, a couple of days later I get a call from the employment office to say come on in. I met with Mr. Treasure there and then and we had a nice conversation, I did some tests, had a medical and got hired. I started as a labourer at the Diesel Shops, which was located just off Terminal Avenue in East Vancouver, not far from the station at the corner on Main Street and False Creek. I was 17 years old.

Working in the Shops was great fun. There was a new experience waiting for me every day. I might prepare the locos due out that afternoon on the Transcontinental passenger train, №2. I would wipe down the engine blocks and clean the windows, make sure the flagging kit had a red flag, torpedoes (legal in those days) and fusees (flares same as the cops use). It was also important to have a clean locomotive cab for the engineers.

I might have to climb down in the pits beneath a loco and take the big hose and wash the underbelly of the beast, a pretty dirty job. Sometimes I would help the hostler move the engines around track to track and in and out of the house by lining the switch points. There were occasions where I would go to the sand house, start the fire and shovel a load of wet sand into the chamber in order to dry it whereafter it would be pumped up into the locos so that the engineers could call on it when they need extra traction. I also fuelled locos.

There were a good number of gentlemen of ethnic background working there and they all treated me as special. There were the Italians Tony and Emilio, a Pole called Stan, a German named Herbie, a Philipino who went by Ernesto and the Greek, Mike. There were a number of other fellows but their names escape me. We worked for the shops bosses, Mr. Craig and Mr. Westlake, both kindly men.

My ethnic co-workers called me “Keed” because that’s what I was. I loved it. Even though I was underage they would take me to the Ivanhoe Hotel on Main Street after work for beers. The barman one time looked at me and said to the Pole, kid looks pretty young, and Polish Stan said, “Dont chew vorry nothingk, keed hees vit oss.” We’d shoot pool. And so it was, good memories with these fine men who looked after this greenhorn.

Later that year I became a switchman/yardman. I was paid $4.01 per hour or $32.08 per day. This was a great job, probably the most satisfying of my career of 46 years. I was building on the national dream every day. It helped a lot if the weather was good as much of it was spent outdoors shunting rail cars around the various yards making up trains, spotting industries and transferring trains between terminals within Greater Vancouver Terminal. It rains a lot in Vancouver.

There was Port Mann Yard (name later change to Thornton Yard), located alongside the mighty Fraser River in Surrey, a picture of which adorns this posting; Lynn Creek Yard which was located in North Vancouver (many bulk commodity loaded trains of coal, sulphur, potash, ores, grain, petrochemicals, etc., were destined there for ships and ports across the world).

There was the Vancouver Main Yard, right beside the aforementioned Diesel Shops and where an intermodal terminal was located at the time. This was a staging point for traffic to and from the Waterfront where containers and grain and merchandise were handled. It was and still is a busy port.

There were a number of ancillary yards around the city as well. In addition, the metro Vancouver rail complex contained many other railway companies vying for time and space as well; Canadian Pacific, BC Rail, Burlington Northern, BC Hydro, all operations with which the railways interchanged traffic.

During those first working years I also got to work in road service which meant trips as a brakeman from Port Mann/Thornton Yard to Boston Bar, located about 115 rail miles to the east through the Fraser Valley and into the Fraser Canyon and beyond. A enduring image very much pronounced in my memory was an autumn run east and seeing hundreds of bald eagles waiting in the evergreen tree tops for a juicy big spawning salmon that had run aground on the sand bars in the river. I imagined that this activity had been occurring annually for literally thousands and thousands of years.

It was said that the running trades employees that worked for CN in Vancouver had a militant pedigree. This is true. The GVT had a reputation nation-wide for this and at various times the employees initiated the “Slow wheel” in response to unpopular company productivity dictates or other issues which adversely affected the status quo. Looking back I remember protracted slow downs in 1973 and 1991, in particular, both lasting a year and more. These made for a tense work environment as the company and unions battled.

Our Superintendent in those years was Robert B. Hopewell, or “Uncle Bob”, as he affectionately known. I really liked the man and the workplace issues were not of his creation, he was a voice of calm and steadiness.

Despite occasional industrial dramas, I have nothing but fond memories of working in Vancouver and seeing a talented workforce move an extraordinary amount traffic. There was a huge variety of assignments to pick and chose from and a huge host of characters to work alongside. The antics of a great host of these men and women will make for a volume of stories somewhere down the line. I have terrific memories of those years.

The abiding takeaway I have to this day, now in my retirement, of working on the railroads no matter where, is this. When a calamity occurs or when the brown stuff hits the fan by way of major track outage or disruption railway employees will put their biases and prejudices aside and come together and unite to get the line open as soon as possible. It’s the railroader’s creed.

In late autumn 1980, my wife, Donata, who I married in 1976, our two young daughters and I moved to Prince George. The town of then about 70,000 souls is located 800 kilometres to the north of Vancouver and in the dead centre of the province of British Columbia.

See you in Part 2…