4 - Sunday, February 16, 1986 - North Shore News — Bob Hunter | THE VIA Rail disaster had a horrible, horrible feeling of inevitability. In a tragedy with many levels, it symbolizes | ® strictly personal ¢ | the end of an era, the end, in fact, of a kind of Canada. The railway was the primal event in the building of the na- tion in the West. Up until the rails were laid down, the Great Lone Land had been almost as much of a natural barrier to union with the new empire in the East as the mountains themselves, There was no single waterway, f and for most of the year the F winter that buried the ham- mered-down earth was too savage f to be braved in the open, except, of course, by the Indians — and even they had mostly been driven f onto that wind-whipped plain in i exile. It was along the tracks as they i were laid that the bones of the nearly vanished buffalo were pil- ed up to be carried away and turned into fertilizer. CITES GREW The towns and later the cities grew up where railway workers had pitched their tents. The line was really a bridge across the ¥ “ocean of grass.” The railway changed everything. Anybody ap- proaching from space today { would take the spectacle of the thousand-mile checkerboard of vast farms spreading across the | Prairies as one of the greatest wonders of the planet. Without the trains, all that would have remained wild and seamless. What was perhaps most amaz- ing about the ribbon of -steel, | however, wasn’t the physical transformation it brought, so much as the fact that it remained the only real link across Canada | for most of the year until after the Second World War. } It was not until the very end of the 1940s that snowplows were f invented big enough to keep the i Trans-Canada Highway open through the winter. PLANES SMALL It was possible to fly across the country, of course, but airplanes } were small and unreliable, com- pared to the titanic jets that were 1 to come. AS a young reporter, I covered ithe arrival in Winnipeg of the DAN" off most first 60-passenger Trans-Canada Airlines DC-8 from Vancouver. | It was 1963 — not until then had the Jet Age dawned in the Cana- dian West. And while the network of highways that were built never threatened the primacy of the | railway as the lynch-pin between the Great Lakes and the Pacific, | the landing of that DC-8 signall- ed the beginning of the end for the trains. Picking up a tailwind, the jetliner made the hop in just one hour and 53 minutes. There was a time — from the 1880s to the 1960s — when the { railways were the basic factor in Western living. The corruption and political chaos that sur- rounded their birth, generating untold wealth and costing untold lives, led to civil war and con- quest. SERVICE DECAYS It was sad to see the CN and CPR letting their passenger ser- vice start to decay so soon after the jets made their debut. Is “‘decay’’ a fair word? I’m afraid so. It was decay, definite- ly, in the sense that none of the | equipment was replaced or up- dated. 1 last rode Via Rail two years ago. My son and his bride took it to Ottawa last month. It was obvious to all of us, as it is to any Via rider, that the system has been seriously falling } apart for quite a while. The heaters freeze over. The engineers have permanent go- ¢ slow orders to preserve creaking machinery. Your wine is liable to come in a shot glass. The service and meals are lousy, despite the odd cheerful porter or barman. In fact, the diner cars are mostly empty nowadays. The feeling is that one has | slipped somehow back to the 1950s, which, of course, is when “the engines and coaches were built. ; The train that my son took from Vancouver to Ottawa only made it as far as Port Coquitlam before breaking down for six hours. It was not, we noted, an auspicious sign, That big Via Rail accident was no accident. It was inevitable. | Crystal—Glass—Lucite Lapas Gi C tware Monday- Saturday 10 10 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. 1443 Clyde Ave. W. Van. 922-0772 Dinner turns sour A DINNER turned sour far one restaurant patron when police ar- rested the man on a credit-card fraud. A 23-year-old Coquitlam man was recently picked up by North Vancouver RCMP from a local restaurant, where he tried to pay for his $58.90 dinner with another person’s credit card. 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