TRAINS, TRAIN STATIONS AND FREIGHT CARTS - THE DREAM ESCAPE FROM ORDINARY

I don’t know what it was about Bracebridge that made the train so much more intrusive in our daily lives. It must have been the Muskoka River valley and those wickedly cold winter nights, that made the train horn stab through the night air like a knife-blade. I lived up on what was, and is still called, Hunt’s Hill. The train station was located just to the north of the Hunts Hill bridge, and a stone’s throw from the old Albion Hotel......real old even by 1966. We used to get a kick out of sitting on an elevated parking border, adjacent to the tracks, and watching the drunks get tossed out the front door by the bouncer. It’s true what they say. The bouncer didn’t need to open the door with one arm, while tossing the patron out with the other. He wouldn’t use any arm to open the door because the unlucky boozer’s head would suffice. It was a two arm toss onto the cement at the doorway. I loved the view from there. One night I watched the same guy get tossed out three times. Each time, crashing head first into the door, with the warning, “And don’t come back ya bum!” That had to hurt. The head and the downtrodden’s feelings.

It was the 1960's. We had just arrived in town during the winter of 1966, in time to watch local lad, Roger Crozier, playing net for the Detroit Red Wings against Montreal, in that year’s Stanley Cup final. The Wings didn’t win but Roger was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff’s most valuable player. I liked the fact I was now from the same hometown as Roger Crozier. What a blessing it was then to one day actually work for Roger, as public relations director of the Muskoka Branch of the Crozier Foundation. I digress.

The hollow between two hillsides, along the river valley toward the Bracebridge Falls, did something to the sound of the train, such that for us, it seemed to be coming through the wall of our apartment. True enough there wasn’t much insulation in those walls. Outside, it was just crazy clear. Playing road hockey, on Alice Street, you’d half expect to see the locomotive light rising over the hill at the end of the street. The sound echoed and resonated all over the place and somehow joined back together as a stream of sound.....after all the respective vibrations must have bounced back off the architecture of Manitoba Street buildings. Even in the humid air of July nights, the arrival and departure of trains across three crossings, where the horn had to be sounded well in advance, became part of my life and times. I didn’t hate it. I was unsettled by it on occasion. Rather, it was kind of a respite for an over-active kid anyway, because I’d always pause to hear it cross the Toronto Street intersection with River Road. I always thought about where it was coming from, and where it might be was headed. It became an adventure in thought because in actuality we didn’t have much need for rail travel. We didn’t have any money for train trips either. Dreaming of a trip was cheap and I could still amble home in time for dinner. That kept my mother off my back. I was to be home from all my daydreams by five o’clock. No exceptions. A minute late and she suspected I’d been up to .....as she used to say....”NO GOOD!” I tried not to give her any excuse for an intervention. I was up to no good most of the time back then but we all were as mates. Fortunately the town clock tower was within my sight-line from the train station platform.

I have watched a number of television documentaries, and read many books, on the romance of trains and travel by rail.....one that particularly fascinated me was about an American photographer, who had opted to capture images of every remaining steam locomotive crossing the state. It was at the time when steam was being replaced by diesel engines.....and he felt it was critical to national heritage, to capture these remaining images of the old iron workhorses on their final runs. His originals are worth thousands of dollars each......but don’t expect to find many. They are fine art and nostalgia rolled up in one.

I missed the era of the steam engines by quite a margin. None the less I held a fascination about trains, partly because I believed they offered “the dreamer”......”.me,” the free right and privilege to board via imagination, and ride from one side of the country to the other...... having neither ticket nor timetable to return. Except being very aware when my mother Merle was bellowing about “Teddy it’s time to come home!” Or something like that but not so kindly. From so many different positions up on that Hunt’s Hill plateau, did I hear that train horn, and stop in my tracks to hear it pass. It seemed important, at the time, to do this. If you were a kid who daydreamed a lot, you will understand this. Even if I was on my bike, I’d stop for a moment, and judge whether it was possible or not, to make it to the edge of the hill in time, just to watch it cross the intersection. It was an picturesque scene as it passed by the multi-story backs of the Manitoba Street business community, and of course the old clock tower of the former federal building.

On lay-about Saturdays, the local Hunt’s Hill gang, of Rick Hillman, his brother Al, Don Clement and Jim Niven, would wind up at the train station, where we might......just possibly, engage the huge iron-wheeled freight cart that used to sit up on the elevated portion of the station. There was a wooden ramp with strips of wood across, which was supposed to slow the cart down when being pulled to track level by station staff. When we hung out there, I don’t think there was a full-time staff or station manager. We used to get into the lobby and just sit there, pretending we were passengers. I never remember seeing anybody tending the ticket counter. It was a sad and lonely place in those years. As for the freight cart, well, the cleats on the ramp only served to make the ride that much more exciting. We’d often jump aboard and the last one to park his behind on the top, had to get off and push us down the ramp. You want to talk about watching your life pass before you. I know it’s true. I didn’t hear that anecdote for years to come but when I did, (about an unrelated event), I thought about that freight cart. Jesus it almost killed us.

Most of the time we just found time to sit on the ramp, and wait for the arrival of the next train.....passenger or freight. While we thought about how neat it would be to jump on a boxcar for a trip north or south, each time we had the opportunity, we found a convenient excuse. “I’ll do it another day.....it’s almost dinner time.” If my mother even thought I’d been contemplating such a ridiculous adventure, she would have forbidden me to come anywhere near this old station. I couldn’t risk that. I had too much fun hanging out here to gamble on parental intervention.

I was a budding poet, even then, because while most of the kids my age, were looking at the mechanics of the belching, booming beast pulling the train, I was imagining adventures and thinking about all the places these incoming and outgoing trains had visited......and how much joy it would bring, to look out from those passenger car windows, and see the world as a blur.....yet feel as a traveller would, anticipating the final destination. It was a dreamer’s portal, that rickety station, and the day I found it had been torn down......was the day I lost faith in elected officials, to be the stewards of our heritage resources. The Bracebridge Train Station should have, and could have been saved, if there had been the slightest will, to allow the public the right to an opinion on the matter.

Even today, here at Birch Hollow, in Gravenhurst, I will stop on a walk down the lane on a bitter winter’s eve, to hear the crisp horn of a passing train. Curiously, only a short distance further away from our house, than it was up on Hunt’s Hill, during those halcyon days of adventure-seeking childhood. These days I’m not thinking about escape, or signing onto some great cross-country adventure. I’ve had my tours on the rails, and enjoyed each trip. Still, I feel a pang of sentiment and nostalgia when I think back to us lads, sitting on the rail platform, pondering how our lives would turn out in the future. The rail and train became symbolic for us, even though we wouldn’t have thought about it in those terms. I realize it now. It’s why I will still stop in my tracks, while walking the dog or raking the leaves, and sigh.....I suppose, about the good old days, when the train station was our second home, and the rails were the romance of adventure, and the freight cart......very nearly our undoing.

The day my mother died, I remember having to stop at that same rail crossing, adjacent to the Hunt’s Hill bridge, with a box of Merle’s belongings brought from The Pines nursing home, further up on Hunt’s Hill. How strangely poetic it was, as I thought back to all the times her voice resonated, like a train horn, to bring me home for supper. She had about a two block range. No kidding. For additional irony, on the last trip moving my father’s few remaining possessions, (after Ed’s death last year), from his apartment at Bass Rock (just below the tracks on River Road), I had to stop again for a passing freight train. When the train had passed, and waiting for the warning lights to stop, I could have sworn I saw him standing on the other side......winking at his kid one last time. He and I had stood at that intersection so many times, while walking home from grocery shopping at Lorne’s Marketeria. And we watched a lot of trains pass over the years.

Yup, the train and its rails have run through my life......and I’m good with that!