This is beginning to look scary. The April 28th headline of the Cowichan Valley Citizen was a stark reminder that time is running out for the E&N if it’s to be saved as a working railway and not be converted into a recreational trail.
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“Have you hiked the old Mount Sicker Railway grade?”
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One of the downfalls of having to work most of the time is the number of lost opportunities. Over the years there have been many. One I truly regret is not having known Gerry Wellburn, father of the B.C. Forest Museum, today’s B.C. Forest Discovery Centre…
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You won’t find this in Bob Dougan’s book, A Story To Be Told. It’s something he told me personally; of growing up on the family farm on Telegraph Road, Cobble Hill, and of knowing ever so vaguely, even as a child, that there was a skeleton in the family closet.
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“I’ve written a book.” This statement, from almost anyone else, would have been no outrageous thing in itself. I heard if often when wearing my publisher-printer hat.
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Performed at Chemainus Theatre amid rave reviews, the Other Guys Theatre Company’s Good Timber was “a terrific local history lesson” built around (to quote the Cowichan NewsLeader Pictorial) “the logging camp poems of former Chemainus sawmill worker Robert E. Swanson [featuring] many historic clips of Cowichan’s logging days.” Bob who?
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As I admitted in last week’s promo, I ‘borrowed’ this great title from authors and historians Ian Baird and Peter Smith. Several years ago they coined it for their ‘hiking and biking’ guide book to abandoned railways on southern Vancouver Island. These included the two major former railway grades in the Cowichan Valley which are now the Cowichan Valley and the Trans Canada Trails, formerly the E&N Railway extension from Duncan to Lake Cowichan, and the Canadian National Railways mainline from Sooke to Lake Cowichan.
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This special April 1955 issue of The Buzzer, entitled Rails-to-Rubber, “cordially invited” the public to “take a last ride FREE” aboard Vancouver’s street cars which were about to be retired.
This week I share this Buzzer with Chronicles readers who will, I’m sure, find the photos of this now long-gone mode of public transportation as fascinating as I have. Anyone who has ridden a bus lately will realize how far we’ve come in 65 years!