Editorially speaking…
I’ve mentioned before my lifelong love affair with the Island’s railways. Living just one door away from the CNR shortline beside Saanich Lake as a kid, “the tracks” were our playground.
When the train came along, it meant hitching a ride (hanging unseen by the crew from the end of the last boxcar) to the last stop, the Growers Winery, then filching grapes through the hatches of the refrigerator cars.
If that sounds foolhardy, even dangerous, what can I say? To us kids it was a natural part of our growing up at a time when children could be turned loose in the morning to return home—safe and sound—for dinner.
And here I am, all these years later, with all my limbs intact...
The Dayliner, 1960. I preferred walking the E&N grade between Victoria and Courtenay. —BC Archives
With adulthood came the opportunity to explore the the entire southeastern Island by hiking the E&N Railway grade from Victoria to Courtenay, Parksville to Port Alberni. This took years, a few miles at a time, but was worth every minute of it.
Even on stretches of track through more built-up areas was a joy—like turning the telescope around. Instead of the same-old, same-old landscapes glimpsed while driving the Highway, there’s an entirely new viewpoint to be had when looking from the railway tracks to the road.
All the while, of course, Jennifer and I were trespassing.
The E&N, now the Island Corridor Foundation, frowns upon people walking its right-of-ways. Even though entire stretches of them are now so long disused that they’ve become overgrown. Whatever, I make no apology and would do it over again given the chance...
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Which brings me to this week’s Chronicles and guest columnist Tom W. Parkin who, literally, is following in my footprints as both a railway fan and as an author/historian. He comes by his love of railways naturally, his father having been a CPR locomotive engineer.
Tom's dad Cleland (aka "Bluebeard"), at the controls of switch engine 8682. He is nearing his last run before retiring in February 1972. He transitioned from the era of steam to the earliest diesels used by the CPR.
So let Tom Parkin introduce himself in his own words:
“I suppose my freelance writing career was born when a lackluster editor at my hometown paper, the Revelstoke Review, published my first ‘article’. Front page! I was in grade 10 and failed to mention the name of the CPR official I had interviewed. I do remember him looking impatiently at his watch. Oh well, I then went off to UBC to get smarter.
Years later, my first article with a photo spread appeared in Westworld, the [BC Automobile Assoc.] member magazine. They liked it so much they made a safety poster out of it. That encouraged me to quit a good government job and take up freelance writing and photography. “Damn fool,” Dad said.
Thereafter my interests focused on environmental and outdoor recreation topics, including adventure travel and transportation history. “Well done, son,” said Mom.
She liked reading Outdoor Canada, Nature Canada, BC Outdoors, Explore, and BC history. Editors at Canadian Geographic, BC magazine, Equinox and Victoria Times Colonist agreed, all using my material frequently enough that I could afford gruel and crust.
As times changed, so did publishers. I gained experience writing longer material and as co-author of Islands for Discovery, later republished as Haida Gwaii: the Queen Charlotte Islands. I collected unique B.C. words and phrases for a small dictionary, WetCoast Words, and wrote and photographed an educational book for children, Green Giants: Rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.
Other writers have included my work in their own books, including Judith Barker-Sandbrook in her anthology Thinking Through Your Writing Process (McGraw-Hill Ryerson,1989). much more recently, on history topics, my efforts have been awarded three times by the Canadian Railroad Historical Association in Montreal.
Retired since 2018, today I'm most interested in researching and writing on topics of transportation history. Magazines using my material lately include Canadian Rail, CP Tracks, Branchline, Railroad Heritage (USA) and Ffastiniog Railway (Wales). All are in-house publications of national historical societies.”
PS: Tom focuses on uncovering hidden stories about western Canada’s road and rail history. He has articles in current issues of Canadian Rail and Branchline magazines and he’s seeking railfans to join him in the field and in research for future articles.
Readers are invited to contact him through his website: https://tomwparkin.com/
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