End of Term!

Well, this is it. The train has finally stopped in Calgary, marking the end of a four month long adventure of a life time. I have been extraordinarily blessed to have this job, to see the things that I saw and experienced the things that happened. This is certainly a story to keep and to tell to grandchildren.

Here’s the final map of everywhere I went.

Google maps tells me that the total distance is about 20,000km. The earth’s circumference is just over 40,000km. I travelled half way around the world, on a train. Cool! I have also taken almost 4,000 pictures and videos during the term.

Some pros and cons about the job:

Favorite part about the job: The office window, the scenery and views I saw. That or independence, being sent off in a completely new city to fend for myself, do what I want to do, see what I want to see.

Least favorite part: No sports for four whole months. That or waking up at 5am for a 6am start, only to be delayed and hang around and do nothing until finally moving at 10am. (we had to be ready at all times in case we started moving).

Favorite weekend: close call between Winnipeg, Kamloops, or North Bay. I’d have to say North Bay though, climbing around on rocks, running along beach, being in Northern Ontario, taking time to explore what I have been passing by on the train.

Favorite thing I did: skiing in the Rockies

Favorite city: I didn’t get to stay in that many big cities. Winnipeg had a really cool bridge, but there was so much to see in Montreal, so much different architecture, so much more care taken in aesthetics and the art of buildings. I had barely begun to explore the underground area.

Favorite bridge (yes, this is a category): The pedestrian bridge in Winnipeg

Favorite part about facial hair: Not having to shave. You can also save some of the flavor from juice you drink for later.

Least favorite part about facial hair: Scratching the pillow and blankets when trying to sleep. That or the fact that everything freezes to it when it's cold outside. 

Favorite travelled area: Thompson/Fraser river canyons.

2^nd favorite: rest of the rockies

3^rd favorite: shore of lake superior

4^th favorite – Northern Ontario

It’s going to be weird adjusting back to regular life, getting back into a regular routine, being in the same place for longer than one day. I think the biggest shift will be food, having to pay attention to prices in the stores now, and not just grab whatever I want. This also means buying less pre-made stuff and spending more time cooking. Same goes for going out to eat, I have to look at the prices again, not just think about what I want or what sounds good.

This trip has opened my eyes to a whole new world that’s out there, a new way to travel and way to see scenery. Whenever I cross a train track now I’ll be looking at the track and the joint bars, seeing how good they are. And a small smile will cross my face, as I know what it’s like to travel down that way, to live on the rails. I wonder if this has quenched my desire to travel, and if I will be content for a while to stay in one place. Probably not.

My final thought, and an appropriate one I think, is that even though I visited plenty of cities, went to multiple art galleries and museums, saw towering skyscrapers and stretching bridges, sculptures of all sizes and forms, yet NOTHING created by man comes even CLOSE to the astonishing beauty of God’s creation, to marshes surrounded by green forests, the rocky Canadian shield under the spectacular fireworks of fall-colored trees, sunrises and storm clouds in the prairies, snow covered mountains, blue-green rivers, and twisting cliffs of the Thompson/Fraser canyons. That is the thing I have learned the most this trip, how much of an amazing artist our awesome God is.

I have been taking a bunch of videos from the train this term, and am in the process of compiling them together. I will post here once more with the links to them once they are finished.

Until then, merry Christmas and happy new year! And thanks to everyone who showed interest and commented and asked me how my trip was going – it was because of that that I kept this blog updated.

Last Week

We left Kamloops and headed back east to Revelstoke, then down to Cranbrook, east again to Lethbridge and then up to Calgary. We passed through some of the largest mountains that I’ve seen this trip. Most of the time it has either been too cloudy, too dark, or smaller rounded mountains. But I could see some sharp peaks during this trip.

We arrived in Calgary Wednesday morning, and spent Wednesday and Thursday testing the yard there. Thursday evening we brought the train back to the Track Evaluation shop, where it finally stopped moving for the year. One of the guys there showed me around the shop and all the other equipment they had there, from tampers to track aligners to spike pullers. But the most impressive thing was a track cleaner, where they literally took a jet engine from a B-52 airplane, attached it on the back of a truck, and added a big re-director on the back part to blow the air down. The guy said that if they left it blowing on one spot long enough that all that would be left would be the rails, all the stone and ties and spikes would be all blown away. That would be impressive to see work.

I said goodbye to the train, which had been my home for the last four months, and headed off to my hotel. Friday I had off to explore Calgary. I was pretty tired (we had been working long days that week), so I kindof just wandered around the downtown area. It was warm the last couple days, so I didn’t think about wearing much besides my jacket. But it was -15 before wind chill, which was pretty cold. So I mostly stayed inside and wandered through shopping malls and bridges. Found a pretty large garden area on the fourth floor of one shopping mall. Also went up the Calgary tower, and had a pretty good view.

On the pic on the right you can see the train tracks going past. I had gone over those tracks 3 weeks ago testing them. That was a cool feeling, knowing that I had been on there.

My flight left at 6:30, so I went to the airport plenty early, as there would probably be ridiculous traffic and lines given that it was the friday before Christmas. They turned out to be not bad at all though, and I ended up waiting around for a while. Flew to Las Vegas to catch my connecting flight to Toronto (that was the shortest trip available when I was booking). It was cool seeing all the downtown area from the air as we flew in, all lit up at night. Found some slots in the airport, and lost $14 straight without winning even once. Darn slot machines.

Caught my connecting flight to Toronto, and got picked up by my parents. Finally arrived home for good, the end of an adventure of a lifetime!

Last weekend: Mountains

We stopped in Kamloops for the weekend. Friday we went out and had a steak dinner to say goodbye to Anthony, the other co-op student. He’s leaving a week early to go home. Saturday I slept in a bit, and then took a taxi to the airport to pick up the rental car. I was driving back and passing by some mountains, and as I had nothing really planned for that afternoon, I decided to go and climb one. I only had what I was wearing, and luckily my camera, and as it was around 1:00 and it starts getting dark at 3:30ish, I decided against going back to the hotel to get warmer cloths and gloves. Boy would I regret that.

I picking the highest one (obviously), found somewhere to park and began climbing. It was easy going at first, but I quickly found that climbing uphill is actually a lot of work. I had to stop sometimes for breaks. It started to get steeper, and the patches of snow turned into a blanket of snow, which made everything very slippery. My 2 year old shoes with the tread pretty much completely gone certainly didn’t help at all. I was grabbing clumps of grass and bushes to help get up. I made it up to a flatter part, but it didn’t last long, and the real steep part began. And goodness, that was rough. The ground alternated between snow-covered grass (extremely slippery), snow covered loose gravel (also extremely slippery), and snow covered rock (you guessed it…also extremely slippery). The going was very very slow, and I had to plan my route very carefully aiming for trees and bushes. And the uphill never seemed to end. My hands were getting very cold, as I didn’t have gloves and was grabbing snow covered rocks, grass, and branches. Snow was also getting in my shoes, making my feet cold and wet. And to top it all off, it was becoming very obvious that I had forgotten to eat breakfast or lunch. There was one part where the grass clump I was grabbing ripped out and I slid down a meter or two before stopping, scraping my hand on the snow-covered rock, and I thought to myself “what the heck am I doing here. My shoes suck, I’m climbing up at like one meter a minute, it’s going to be dark very soon, my stomach’s grumbling like crazy, and I want to go skiing tomorrow. I should save some energy”. But giving up never really entered my mind as an option, I couldn’t admit defeat. I think it’s a guy thing.

So I continued up, one step at a time, one tree and bush at a time. And I finally made it to the top! It was cloudy and getting dark, so the view wasn’t all that good. I could tell that I was the highest thing in the vicinity at least, which was a pretty cool feeling.

As it was getting dark, I started heading back down, which I had been putting off as long as possible. I didn’t want to take as much time going down as I did going up, so I ended up sliding down on my but a lot, aiming for trees as most of the time I couldn’t stop on my own. Finally made it to the flat part, and down the last part to the car. I was brushing myself off, and I realized that the seat of my pants was completely ripped to shreds from sliding over rocks on my way down. Good thing I realized that before going out for supper.

I went back to the train, changed, dropped the laundry off, finally had supper, and then went to go see the hobbit, which was fantastic. That was my favorite story growing up, and it’s cool to see it on film now. Dwarves are cool. I tried to get back to the hotel, but the maps in the GPS we have are old and the roads weren’t the same. So I was pretty lost for a while, getting back at 11:00ish. As I was getting into bed, I thought to myself “jeremie, you’re dead tired. Your calves still hurt from that run you did on Thursday, you have a scraped shin, you just climbed a whole mountain on no food. And you just set your alarm for 6:35am to go and ski for a full day. You’re crazy” That made me chuckle J

Sunday I went skiing at Sun Peaks, about an hour drive out of Kamloops. They had 40cm of snow the night before, so there was tons of snow and powder, and everyone was saying how amazing it was that day. There was one run in particular where I was skiing in snow almost up to my waist, which was pretty incredible. It was really cloudy and foggy at the top, just like revelstoke. But part way down the hill there were some breaks in the clouds, and the sun even came out for a bit. The view was pretty sweet.

I was finally getting comfortable at skiing on the steep downhill parts and through powder. Before I would turn and stop, then turn and stop, but near the end of that day I was able to go continuously. I certainly wasn’t graceful, but I could go much faster than I was before. Too bad this was probably my last time skiing on a legit hill for a while.

Got back to the train at 6pm all worn out, and started all the weekend chores and shopping that I hadn’t done. I was hoping for a later start on Monday so I could get some rest, but the schedule said to get up at 4:15am. Guess I’ll get sleep Tuesday then. Wait… 3:45am wake up that day. Lovely. Ah well, it was worth it J

We are heading west back to Golden, then south to Fort Steel, west the Lethbridge and then up to Calgary, and should be done on Thursday. My flight leaves Friday evening, and after a layover in Las Vegas I arrive back home Saturday morning!

Through the rockies!!

We left Revelstoke heading west, following the Thompson and Fraser rivers, passing through Kamloops, Mission, and arriving in Vancouver before returning back to Kamloops for the weekend. And the scenery we passed through has been spectacular, by far my favorite of the term so far. Following through the canyons made by the rivers, with steep mountains on either side, going over bridge after tunnel after bridge in an effort to keep the line as level as possible.

It was interesting to follow the transition of countryside, from the snowy mountains of revelstoke to the almost desert of Kamloops, then through the much greener Thompson/Fraser canyons, before flattening out and the river getting much calmer as we approached Vancouver. Canoeing that river has now been added to my bucket list.

It was cool stopping at the end of the line in Vancouver. We started pretty far east (St John’s, NB), went as far north as possible (Moosenee), and now as far west (Vancouver).

I also added 3 bald eagles to my wildlife count, which was really cool to see those in the wild. They’re actually pretty big, big enough to be noticed travelling really fast by them. I managed to take a quick pic of the first one I saw, but the others passed by too fast to do anything but stare. It’s a really blurry pic, but it’s proof that I did see them.

During the course of this week I took 640 pictures, and after one pass through removing the bad ones, was still left with 375 very good pictures. That has been quite a pain to reduce, as the pictures I am now removing are all of very nice scenery. I’m trying to reduce them to a max of about 30 pictures per week to keep. I might have to break that rule this week. 

We are in Kamloops for the weekend, and I’m planning on going skiing again this weekend, at Sun Peaks resort. This will likely be my last chance to do so in the rockies for a while! I hope that skiing in Ontario hasn’t been ruined for me now…

Skiing in the rockies!!

What an amazing experience. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s like eating stale bread your whole life and then going to a gourmet restaurant. Like watching house league soccer, and then seeing Lionel Messi play. Like skiing at Chicopee and Blue Mountain, and then going skiing on the ski hill with the largest vertical in North America. It’s just a totally different experience.

We parked in Revelstoke for the weekend, and Saturday I went skiing at the resort there, which has the largest vertical (1.7km) in North America. It is fairly new, only a couple years old, and has already been called the greatest ski resort on Earth (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/snowandski/9718438/Revelstoke-Canada-the-greatest-ski-resort-on-Earth.html).

I went there for 8:30 (that's when it opened), so I was in the first couple runs. I took a gondola to the base of the main hill, then another gondola to the midpoint, and then a chair lift to the top. Probably took me 20 minutes to get all the way up. The top 1/6ish (half of the last ski lift) was in the clouds and really foggy, and snowing almost all the time.  Only the top half was open cause there wasn't enough snow on the bottom. But there was a lot of snow on the top, apparently a 1.5m base. And so much powder! That’s something new to me, skiing through powder. And cause I was there at opening, it hadn't been packed down yet. I was skiing through the snow, but I couldn't see my skis, and the snow came up almost to my knees. It was really cool, and so fluffy!

I did the easier runs at first, remembering how to ski, and then moved onto some harder ones, and then went exploring through the trees. That was also really fun, making my own trail through half a meter of powder and going around trees. I then went to the advanced runs, which was pretty legit. There were rock faces and cliffs, felt like I was actually on a rocky mountain. And really steep! Some parts about 70 degrees. I had to go pretty slow down those parts. I thought I was a decent skiier, but compared to the people who just flew down the steep parts, I have a long ways to go.

The runs were very long too, most about 15 or 20 minutes. The one time I checked it took 25 minutes, but I went the long way and stopped for breaks somewhat often. It was so long that I usually can't make it all the way down without stopping to rest. When I would go skiing back in Ontario, I would decide each run if I wanted to go fast, or go slower and carve more and make it last longer. But here I could do whatever I wanted, go fast for a bit, then carve, then go through some trees, then back to the main run and go fast again, and repeat 6 or 7 times all the way down. And remember that this is only on half of the hill, their longest run is 15km of downhill skiing. That would be quite the trip.

The people there are really friendly too, I had a bunch of conversations with people on the lifts going up. I met a girl from New Zealand, a CP Conductor who had transferred from Winnipeg to here so he could go skiing more often, and a girl from France. It was nice to hear a real French accent, after having spent so much time in Montreal.

One thing I found out is that facial hair, moist breath, snow, and cold air can make a very annoying combination, with my entire upper lip becoming one large ice cube. Whenever I smiled or grimaced all the hairs would pull, so I had to try and keep a neutral expression.

The hill closed at 3:00 (which is about when it starts to get dark there), so I headed back to the hotel. Didn’t do much else that weekend, went for a walk and found a cool suspension bridge, but that’s about it. Was planning on going for a longer walk Sunday morning, but I woke up at 9ish, and checkout was at 11, so I didn’t have time. Did maintenance and chores for the rest of the day.

Next week is travelling through Kamloops to Vancouver, and then back to Kamloops for the weekend. And I’m planning on going skiing there as well!

To the rockies!

I didn't do much in Winnipeg, as I had been feeling sick most of the week previous. So I mostly stayed in bed, didn't do much exploring. 

We left early Monday morning, heading west. I don’t think I fully appreciated before just how vast the prairies are, and how big the sky is. It was cloudy Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday was mostly clear, and that morning I saw one of the most spectacular sunrises I’ve seen, it just lit up half the sky. Pictures just don't do it justice.

It actually feels like I’m going to new places now. Southern Ontario I had all been to before, Winnipeg was pretty much in Ontario, and last time I was this far we knew we were going right back to Montreal, so the adventure wasn’t there. But this week our destination is revelstoke, in the rockies. It was cool starting Thursday morning out of Medicine Hat, finally going further west than we had ever gone, and each minute was brand new territory.

Thursday afternoon I could finally see the mountains in the distance! They were still a very long ways off though. I could also see downtown Calgary, even though we were still like 30 miles away. That certainly something that doesn’t happen in Ontario. We actually ended up going right through downtown Calgary, among all the tall skyscrapers.

It got dark shortly after that, and we couldn’t see anything. Which was really frustrating, cause I knew we were getting closer to the rockies. I was looking at the mileposts, and could see that we were passing through Banff, Lake Louise, through Kicking Horse pass and the spiral tunnels, with the supervisors saying how nice the view was from there overlooking Field. But I could barely see the trees on either side of the train.

Spend Thursday night in Field, and woke up Friday morning, knowing that we were in the rockies, surrounded by mountains, but still hadn’t seen them close up. Eventually the day started to brighten, and I could finally see the silhouettes of the mountains. We started moving, and we passed beside these huge giants, the tops reaching through the clouds. It was snowy most of the day and pretty cloudy, so I couldn’t make out much. But we passed alongside blue/green rivers tumbling over rocks and snow-covered logs. And the trees are huge!! They towered over the train, easily 5 stories tall, and when I looked down we were on a hill and the trunks went down another 3 or 4 stories. I have to climb one of them.

We passed through a bunch of smaller tunnels, and then the Macdonald tunnel, 14.7km long. Traveling at 30mph, it took us 20 min to go through it. It was a weird feeling, knowing there was a whole mountain on top of you.

I also realized that I am one of the very select few who have travelled that line and seen that scenery. VIA travels along CN lines, so the only people who travel along the CP lines through the mountains are the conductors, maintenance crews, and us. And a lot of the places are so remote that they are only accessible by train. And no one else really seems to care about the spectacular scenery going by, they are just used to it. One of the supervisors, who is from the prairies, says that you can’t see anything at all, since the mountain is right there in front of your face. I’m just thankful that I get to see it, and by train too, which is so much better than by car.

We got to revelstoke, where we parked for the weekend. There’s a ski hill here that apparently has the largest vertical in North America, so I’m doing that on Saturday. I’ve always wanted to go skiing in the rockies, it’s on my bucket list of life. So I’ll be checking that one off over the weekend!

Snow

Snow. What a love/hate relationship.

On one hand, it makes everything stunningly beautiful. I thought nothing could come close to northern Ontario during the peak of fall. But northern Ontario under a blanket of snow is also pretty spectacular.

The downside of snow is that it can really mess with the data. There’s a laser that shines on the rail, and a camera that picks up the profile of the laser on the rail. There are crosshairs that detect the top and the lip of the rail, and that’s where all the measurements are taken from. If there is snow all the way up to the head of the rail, then the camera picks up the laser shining on the snow, and the crosshairs don’t know what to do. 

Here is a typical stream of gauge measurement:

And this is the same stream when there’s a lot of snow:

The vertical axis is gauge distance, with 56.5 being the specified measurement. Depending on the class of track, anything above 58 inches could be an urgent defect. If you look at how many times the data goes above 58 inches in the bottom pic, there are a lot of urgent defects detected, none of which are valid. And that’s only over 580 feet (the bottom axis is distance in feet).

A typical subdivision (usually 130-180 miles) results in 600 or 700ish defects. A couple hundred is a good run, and anything over 1,400 or 1,500 is a bad run. These would be both urgents and priorities, with probably 95% being priorities, which no one really cares about as it’s not bad enough to worry about it. The first run that we did with significant snow, the system recorded 14,800 defects. At the end of that sub, the combined books for the track supervisors were literally over a foot high of paper. After that run we turned off a lot of the defects, and now we’re just measuring gauge and GRMS. So the books are manageable again.

The snow also clogs up the cameras, resulting in no image at all. We have a trigger near our stations that turns on an air compressor that blows air through hoses to the lenses of the cameras to clean it up, which works most of the time. The snow is also very annoying for the daily maintenance, cleaning the cameras/lasers, as well as changing the lube sticks for the deployable axle. The holes for the cameras are too small for gloves, which means bare hands have to be used a lot of the time. Ice can sometimes get stuck in the holes, so we have to use a screwdriver to scrape it off, while trying not to scratch the glass. And of course all the equipment is very close to the ground, and to clean some of them we have to get down on our backs to access the cameras, all in the cold snow. Luckily it hasn’t been too cold or too deep of snow yet, but apparently sometimes we have to get the shovels out.  

Yet even with all that trouble, the snow can still make things very pretty under the train, with cool icicles hanging from the lights. You just gotta find the positives in life J

Last week was travelling from Sudbury from Winnipeg. We were supposed to go to Brandon, but the engine died on Thursday, so we stayed in Winnipeg for repairs. The plan for next week is to go all the way to Kamloops, which means the rockies! 

Sudbury

Friday was a maintenance day, and I started cleaning up/sorting the boxcar tools. There is a huge tool chest for us to use, but the problem is that they aren’t organized properly. So if someone needs a specific tool, they look for it for a bit, can’t find it, so they go out and buy a whole set, put the rest in the chest and use just the one they want. And they don’t put it back, so the next person goes out and buys a whole set again. So we end up having tons of extra stuff, but not many of the things we actually need. Finally someone did something about it, where they gathered all the tools from both testing trains and put them all in a big pile. They thought it would be better to just have the tools in the drawers in the chest, so they threw away all the individual set cases and put them all loose. They ran out of time, so they dumped all the individual tools back into the tool chest, resulting in a huge mess.

This was especially obvious when going through all the socket sets, which were all loose. After spending about 6 hours sorting them all into the same sizes (during which I discovered we had 13 7/16^th sockets), I finally put together some complete sets. We now have 29 full socket sets for drives ranging from ¼ to 1 inch, plus a whole bunch of extras. It was kindof fun though, seeing it go from a complete mess to nice and orderly.

Saturday afternoon I took off for a walk, hoping to see some new areas as I had already explored Sudbury once. I found a nice walkway by a stream, and followed that for a while, until I came to a street and could see a cool looking rocky hill. As I was no longer travelling by train, and could now stop and spend time wherever I wanted, I took off to see if I could climb it. I found another path that headed in the right direction, and then stopped at a pile of rocks,  so thinking I had found out how to get to them I ran on the rocks only to find that a large marsh area separated me from it. (I would have had some pretty sweet pictures about this place, but I cleaned out my memory card thinking I had transferred everything over, when I hadn’t. shoot). So I went further down the road till I found a small access road that lead to a path from which I could get to the rocks. I ran around on them for a couple hours, found some pretty sweet spots for some decently legit rock climbing (don’t worry mom, I was completely safe!). I also found some ponds of water that had frozen over that would have made some sweet spots to slide around on, but it couldn’t quite hold my weight. Angered by the denial of the fun that it would have been, I found a bunch of large rocks and threw them into the pond and made a bunch of holes in the ice. Hehe J. It was getting dark (it gets dark so early now! So much lost exploring time), so I headed back to the train. I stopped at a Japanese place for supper, and ordered some noodles which turned out to be very slippery. It was only after I had ordered that I noticed the folly of my decision, as there was no cutlery on the table, only chopsticks. Of course I wasn’t going to ask for cutlery, so I ate it all with chopsticks. I was quite proud of that. Went to see Wreck it Ralph that evening.

Sunday I had lunch with my aunt and uncle, and then did chores and laundry and shopping for the rest of the day. The plan for next week is to continue westwards through the rest of northern ontario to Brandon, Manitoba. The systems seem to work alright, hopefully it continues that way!