Page 16 - May June 2007

W A Corkill
The early 1980s were a golden age because you could fly to Vancouver Airport, hire a Pontiac Grand Am (if they had one) and dawdle across the bridge onto Lulu Island in the City of Richmond, so named by that great navigator, Captain George Vancouver RN, in 1792.
There you could relax in a comfortable hotel after a five­minute drive and spend the rest of the day recovering from jet lag, or maybe crossing the Fraser’s North Arm to visit Van Hobbies. Early next day you could drive ten miles north on Granville St, thread downtown skyscrapers before the rush hour, and stop to admire the totem poles in Stanley Park.
Then on across Lions Gate suspension bridge, ‘make a right’ onto Marine Drive, make three lefts and end up in Travelodge’s spacious car park, right next to Denny’s 24­hour restaurant. From there it was a short hop to Ambleside Park, to take up a position trackside on the British Columbia Rail line where it crossed Capilano Creek. And the astonishing thing is that I never found another photographer in that absolutely perfect spot.
Soon after 10.30 am in summertime (daily except Mon and Tues) a plume of steam would appear in the distance, followed by a chime whistle voluntary for the grade crossing in the Indian Reserve, and the fireman would shovel sand into the firebox of Royal Hudson No 2860 as the engineer ‘widened on the throttle’ and sent a column of smoke and steam a hundred feet up into the air. The idea was to clean the flues so the oil­fired locomotive could exert its maximum power for the climb over a ridge of the precipitous Coast Range Mountains. Now most UK schoolboys get their knowledge of the Rockies from misleading Hollywood films, so I had better explain that in the 1740s the French­Canadian sons of M. le Chevalier Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, discovered what they called ‘Les Montagnes Rocheuses’, and the name stuck. But the Rockies end at the Columbia River and are followed to the west by the Purcells, Selkirks, Monashees, Cascades and the Coast Range. The Rockies are among the youngest geologically, and in Canada are mostly under 12,000 ft above sea level, whereas mountains further west can be more dramatic, older and harder. They rise to 13,000 ft in British Columbia and to nearly 20,000 ft on the Yukon­Alaska frontier. Forget the Rockies and spend your time and money exploring the West Coast!
I don’t know what #2680’s train is like in 2007, but in the Golden Age it had a dozen perfectly matched ex Canadian Pacific maroon cars and a tail­end Mountain Observation car of 1956 vintage, named
Royal Hudson #2860 climbing past Ambleside Park in the 1980s
‘Mount Garibaldi’. The train was always fully booked, from 1974 until it ended a few years ago. I never managed to get a seat on it, but I would very much have liked to travel on a coach named ‘Sundance’ because that was the name of a power plant I helped design and construct in 1968–70.
As the train thundered past, I gathered my camera kit and set off to walk back to my car for a leisurely 38­mile drive along the magnificent Howe Sound, to Squamish. The easy way was to ‘make a right’ onto Taylor which led uphill to join the Trans Canada, but on a fine day one
could continue on Marine Drive West to photograph some rather fine totem poles at Eagle Harbour.
At Horseshoe Bay the Trans Canada goes aboard a 6000­ton ferry for the crossing to Vancouver Island, but Highway 99 North clings to the rocky coastline to Britannia Mines, Shannon Falls and Squamish where the West Coast Railway Museum is a mile west of the main road, past MacDonalds. It has over 70 locos and cars of the local lines as well as Great Northern. The ‘world centre for the bald eagle’ comes next, at Brackendale, then Cheakamus Canyon and Whistler, a
1 ROUNDHOUSE
W Alan Corkill