Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Riding the rails
Like many young men his age, I suspect, my grandson is fascinated by trains. He spends hours on his parents’ living room floor, or on ours, building different patterns of track for his ever-growing collection of Thomas engines and rail cars (the marketing geniuses behind the Thomas phenomenon know they can just keep inventing new engines until they run out of names - Sodor must be a very large island).
I think train sets are among the best of toys for stimulating the young mind. Young Declan even practises his counting as he sets new records each week for the longest train. The only trouble is, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to tear the lad away from his trains when other trivialities, like meals or bedtime, beckon.
I discovered this to my distress this past Sunday when we decided to celebrate Declan’s third birthday (although he kept insisting he was four) by taking him for his very first ride on a “big” train: the York-Durham Heritage Railway.
It was supposed to be a surprise, but Grampy (that’s me) spilled the beans a few days before, so just about everyone he talked to in the preceding week was told with great excitement that he was going to be going on the big train with Grampy and Grammy on his birthday. And we were just as excited as he was.
On the morning of the trip, the family van (his brothers, 15 years and three months in age, and his parents would also be going on the train) pulled into the lot beside the Uxbridge station about 20 minutes before the scheduled 10:00 departure. As soon as his dad unbuckled him from his car seat, Declan raced up to Grammy and me, gave us some perfunctory hugs, and then went to stand beside the train.
“All aboard!” he cried, just as he’d heard countless times on his Thomas movies. And we obeyed him, just as soon as his mother had taken him to the toilet in the station.
As the train pulled out on its short jaunt to Goodwood, the lad “oohed” and “aahed” as the engine clanged its bell and tooted its whistle. He was constantly tempted to lean his head out the window to look at the tracks below him, even though the conductor (whom he regarded with awe) had expressly told him not to.
Then we headed back to the baggage car to get some snacks for the family, and as we stepped from one car to the next, there was of course a place where he could look down and see the ground going by under his feet (not very rapidly, mind you - the YDHR isn’t exactly the Bullet Express). That was, in his words, cool.
But then things, you might say, went a bit off the rails. For opposite the concession stand was, of all thing, a toy train set. I’m not sure why the Railway thought it was a good idea to put a model train on a real train. Not only does it distract from the “big” train experience, it inevitably leads to disputes among those children who play with it, as they all of course want the same cars.
Whatever the rationale, my grandson immediately forgot how cool the big train was and switched into “little train” mode. When I suggested that we return to our seats, he declined. When I repeated the suggestion, he pretended to not even hear me.
At any rate, I eventually ended up hauling him bodily back to the rest of the family. Tears ensued for a time, but were quickly forgotten when we got to Goodwood and the engine went right by Declan’s window as it switched from one end of the train to the other.
That was nothing, however, to the thrill the boy got when we got back to Uxbridge and, as a special birthday treat, he got to ride up with the engineer and ring the bell and pull the whistle as the engine once more switched ends in the yard. My thanks to Ron Layton and Denis Godbout and the rest of the YDHR crew for giving a little boy such a huge treat.
After all that, it was just a bonus when we went up to Heritage Days at the museum. Declan loved all the old tractors and cars, but when we walked into the schoolhouse, his mouth dropped open when he saw two big, beautiful table-top electric train sets, each with numerous trains and marvellously intricate layouts of miniature towns. And wouldn’t you know? One of the engines on one of the layouts was none other than Thomas himself. Amazing.
I don’t remember my third birthday, or even my 23rd birthday, for that matter. I’ll have to ask my mom if I was as obsessed with toy trains at that age as my grandson is. I doubt it; Thomas hadn’t been born yet.
But I sure have come to love trains in later years; there’s nothing like the whistle of a train in the night, it almost matches the call of a loon for taking your breath away. And although I look forward to riding any number of trains with Declan as he grows up, there’s one particular train I want to take him on. It’s an old steam train that goes from Alaska’s Inside Passage, up over the mountains into the Yukon.
There’s no train like it, not even Thomas, and I’m almost certain Declan will agree. .
