Half way up the mountain, parked among a fleet of Semi tractors......
A CABOOSE!
Remember you can click on the picture to get a full view.
That's right.......a caboose! It's been eons since the trains have ended their lines with a caboose. Apparently they are not economical once all the engines have been converted to diesel power. They didn't need anyone riding the back of the train watching for fires from the steam barrel (if that's what it was called).
The caboose was my favorite part of the train. As a small child I can remember standing at the crossings and waving, just to say hello. The engineers waved back to us all the time, and it was always a thrill when they did. But the guy in the caboose must have been a father or an uncle because on special days like Halloween and Easter, he would toss candy at us from his perch on that back porch at the very end of the car. He made our day and we felt special for a little while. There are days, when the world has gone just too far that I long to be that small child standing at the crossing once again.
Much of my young life was spent in the Northwest Territories, where there are no trains. The muskeg would just swallow the tracks overnight, I'm sure, and the permafrost made laying a solid foundation for the tracks impossibly expensive and improbable.
Now I live down the road from the home base of the Rocky Mountaineer and, when my daughter was smaller, I used to walk to the train tracks every Thursday afternoon to wave at the passengers. Never has a train gone buy when someone didn't wave back at us! April is upon us and soon the Mountaineer will once again blow past our community. I hope to be there to say "hello" once again.
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