September 30, 2021 is the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Canada had 140 federally run Indian Residential Schools from 1831 to 1998, and the harm caused by these schools reverberates today. This day was created to honour the children of residential schools, their families and communities.
I was in Moncton, New Brunswick recently for business. After that was concluded, I headed to the Fredericton-Oromocto area to visit my mom. I hadn’t seen her since December 2019 due to COVID travel restrictions. I spent Friday afternoon and evening with her, then headed out around 9 PM. I was still internally on Manitoba … Read more
Steve burst into the kitchen, slamming the screen door behind him. As he stomped past his mother, up to her elbows in greasy dishwater, she cried out, “Hey! Improve your attitude!”
Occasionally I get an email from someone who needs some historical railway information. Sometimes it’s an author trying to confirm some details, or see what train was feasible for their character to take; often it is someone doing some research on their ancestors and trying to find out how they traveled across Canada. Recently I … Read more
I visited the Kitchener-Waterloo region of Ontario recently to visit my son and daughter-in-law. I’m grateful that the pandemic restrictions have eased enough that I was able to do that, since I hadn’t seen them in a very long time. We managed to squeeze in a bit of railfanning while I was there. On my … Read more
It’s not every day that you get to see a big SD90MAC locomotive rolling down a branch line. I didn’t want to lose that opportunity.
It’s been a busy few weeks getting my daughter ready to start college in Toronto. College! I remember when she could barely walk and here she is, living in Hogtown without us. Yikes. My wife and I drove her to Toronto via the Trans-Canada Highway through northern Ontario. We would have preferred to drive through … Read more
The town of White River, Ontario is a small dot on the Trans-Canada Highway north of Lake Superior. It is known as the “birthplace” of Winnie the Pooh, and rail enthusiasts know it as the endpoint of the last public RDC service running in Canada, the Sudbury-White River train.
I’ve uploaded some “new” David Othen videos to his YouTube channel. These are of course not new – since David died in September 2016 – but they were not previously shared on his channel before. Some of the content is in other videos on the site but these clips are “new”. Here’s a short (6m … Read more
I confess that I don’t pay a lot of attention to shipping containers. When two miles of double stacked containers roll by, my eyes glaze over a bit and I don’t look at individual containers. There are just too many and most are fairly generic.