Nostalgia

Nostalgia. I woke up in a fit of nostalgia this morning and lay in bed drilling back into my past. I was at the railway station on  Brunette Avenue in New Westminster where I worked in the summers of late high school and early university. Growing up years. Rubbing elbows with real work years. Dennis Dixon's dad Don was freight Station Agent in Vancouver and both of us kids needed summer work so introductions were made.

            Harold MacDonald was the Chief Clerk at that time and he had a magnificent belly. He had played professional football in his time but now the muscle had continued to grow until it entered the room before Harold did. "Sorry boys", Harold said, "I don't have any jobs open right now but tell me what you can do".  I looked around the office and saw men at desks typing and just as an afterthought as we were being escorted to the door, I said that I can type. "Well why didn't you say so right off, you can start on Monday to cover off for holidays".

            Nostalgia is a funny thing. It brings back all the sights, sounds and smells. That station in New West had an unforgettable smell that I can only get a hint of now, walking on tracks on a hot day. The station smell started as you walked across the platform towards the tracks. Creosote from the ties, ballast rock, oil from leaky journals before they all changed to ball bearings. The smell of box car steel and wood and the thousands of things that had leaked into the switching yard. And the dunnage on the rip track and all the pieces of dunnage that the switch men used to jamb under a wheel to keep a car in place with no air in the brake tanks.

            When you stepped into the station itself, the smell was kind of dusty. It wasn't actually dusty inside but it smelled dusty, I suppose, from the thousands of people that moved through there from everywhere. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter and the one constant was the rumble of the diesel switch engine that was never turned off. If it was working, the thrum of the diesel would drown out the rumble of the cars and when the throttle was backed off, the whine of the blower still continued after until it too wound down.

            Do you notice that when you start drilling back with nostalgia, it indiscriminately takes you back from place to place or time to time? I first remembered that station in New Westminster from the back seat of a 1929 wine coloured Hudson sedan in 1952 or 1953. Now this time was twenty years after the dirty thirties depression but there was still a hobo jungle across the tracks from the station. People were still hopping freight trains from place to place. By the time I worked there, the jungle was gone, bulldozed to "clean up" the city. They bulldozed the nearby dump one day too and hundreds of rats came across the tracks heading for better pickings in town.

            Nostalgia isn't just about bringing back the good stuff, it brings back embarrassing stuff too. The really bad stuff probably wouldn't be classified as nostalgia, though. High school kids working in a man's world, we were put in positions of directing the work of the switch crew. I would type up where loaded box cars, flat cars, gondola cars and tank cars were to go and which industries needed empty cars to load with their goods.  The switch crew would then shuffle the cars into the proper order and make up a train. Sometimes cars would need to be given to the CP, CN or BC Hydro Railways. I made a mistake with a car of goods and put it in a train destined for the CP. The switch foreman of course recognized this car as having been moved to us, loaded, previously, probably from the CP, and came in to ask about it. The whole crew was in for coffee anyway and were standing around listening. Stupid me wouldn't back down when I had the chance and just insisted that the car was destined correctly. I can still picture the foreman's face, about six inches from mine, with this small you-stupid-kid-you grin. To his credit, he didn't get angry but knew that I could learn the hard way and that car went where I had sent it. After the crew left, I started the paperwork to bring that car back on someone else's shift. It made it to Saskatoon before it was turned around.

            We had these big, black Olivetti typewriters and because everything had to be done in triplicate or even quadruplicate with carbons, you really had to pound the keys. The carbon papers would wear out so a really hard touch on the keys was necessary. Computerization was just starting then and at the Vancouver freight station, punch cards were being used to identify freight cars. The computer itself was a big Univac located in St. Paul, Minnesota. The men that were used to pounding the typewriter keys were having a hard time converting to the lighter touch of the key punch machine. And when the IBM electric typewriters came in, that became even harder. Just look at our keyboards today.

            Travel by train was still fairly common place in the 1960's and both Canadian National and Great Northern trains came through the station. The station actually belonged to the Great Northern Railway as did the tracks from the railway bridge at New Westminster all the way to Vancouver. Great Northern had beat the Canadian Pacific to British Columbia in the late 1800's so they owned that right-of-way.

            As it became closer to passenger train time, people would begin to drift in, waiting for someone or waiting to get on. I would have to get up from my typing and go and check baggage that was to be put on the train. Baggage and express was loaded onto four, large steel-spoked wheeled hand carts with high end rails. They literally were hand carts in days gone by but were now pulled by a grey Fordson tractor.  Usually, one cart and sometimes two carts, were piled high with baggage and sometimes a coffin, that needed to be loaded into the baggage car. The baggage car was close behind the locomotive or second unit, depending on the train, so I would know approximately where the car would stop and be waiting when the train came. The baggage handler on the train was always grouchy and in a hurry because he didn't want a train delay because of him.

            When the train started to move, the platform was clearing of people and the Fordson with empty carts would be moving, in the opposite direction to the train,  back to the station. By the time the last car cleared the station it would be going at a good clip. One soft, summer evening George, another summer student, was distracted by the mini-skirted crowd and allowed the tractor to wander into the accelerating train.  In an instant the tractor was lifted back onto the platform, George's eyes became the size of dinner plates and the poor old Fordson wheezed its last. The last days of passenger traffic at that station was served by a John Deere lawn tractor.

            True nostalgia, for guys anyway, brings back cars of the past. In those days, I drove a '56 Chevy station wagon, lime green. Hardly a babe magnet, although I tried. The usual comeback for an attempted pick-up was, "Do you know where the gas is? Then step on it". George, however, or rather George's mom had a 1961 Cadillac convertible, racing green, white leather seats, long, wide, with fins. Man, when George got the Caddy for the night, possibilities became endless. Cruise Granville Street or Stanley Park or go to the university or go to the dance at Boundary Bay. Whooee.