Aboard The Boundless: The Brakemen

It is the most dangerous job on the railroad.

A brakeman's job is to apply the brakes to slow the train. Sometimes this is done from the safety of a caboose or guard car. Other times the brakemen must cross on top of a moving train, to turn the brake wheels of individual freight and boxcars.

Every day during the 1880's, somewhere on the continent, at least one brakeman is killed on the job. It is common for brakemen to be missing fingers, hands, arms, or legs.

The Boundless has over 900 cars. There are dozens of brakemen aboard.

Their pay is low, their chance of death or injury is high. Some of them, who risked life and limb for the CPR, are looking for payback. They think it might just be in that fancy funeral car of Cornelius Van Horne...

Aboard The Boundless: Sandford Fleming

Sandford Fleming is an engineer and a surveyor for the CPR, but he’s probably best known as the inventor of Standard Time.

 

Now that trains were crossing great expanses at great speeds, it became necessary to develop time zones. Before then, time was pretty much up for grabs, decided by every town or region as they saw fit. Fleming divided the entire world up into 24 zones.

 

What’s less well known about him is that he invented something called Cosmic Time, which is the same all over the world. He actually has a special clock which shows Standard Time and Cosmic Time.

 

Cosmic time never catches on -- but one of the interesting things about time zones in The Boundless, is that they’re a bit permeable.

 

Whenever the train passes through a time zone,  there’s a little, shall we say, shimmer. An adjustment. A moment of confusion, maybe just a few second, which makes sleight of hand all the easier.

 

Imagine the possibilities...

 

 

Inside The Boundless: Part II

Second Class aboard a train like The Boundless is also very comfortable. The passengers are accommodated aboard Pullman cars that convert to upper and lower berths at night time.

Shooting at passing wildlife through open windows was a very popular pastime in the early days of train travel.

The Boundless made this all the easier by having a repurposed flat bed car for gentlemen and ladies to try their aim at the magnificent, though fast dwindling, herds of buffalo.

 Third Class becomes a little more cramped, and less well appointed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fortunately, the Saloon Car gives passengers a chance to stretch their legs, have a refreshing drink or three, gamble, dance, and possibly engage in a gunfight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thousands upon thousands of immigrants began rail journeys from Halifax and Montreal to begin new lives out west with their land grants from the Government of Canada.

The Colonist Cars offered rudimentary accommodation at best. At times it was little better than a livestock car. There were scant washroom facilities, a stove at either end of the car for heat and cooking.

Passengers were responsible for their own meals.

 

 

In the next post, we'll take a look at some of the fascinating people aboard the maiden voyage of The Boundless!

The Boundless: Sasquatch

There is no satisfactory photograph of a sasquatch. There are tricky animals to track down.

Certainly the sasquatch in The Boundless look nothing like this burly fellow to the left. They are much, much scarier. But they are certainly a fact in my world -- as much a part of the mountain fauna as a bear or cougar.

There are other names for this creature, namely Big Foot, or -- and maybe Yeti, his Himalayan cousin. The name Sasquatch itself is possible a derivation of a First Nations' word sask'ets, or stick man. I liked the notion of a stick man...


During the construction of the CPR, the sasquatch proved troublesome to the work crews. The young ones were merely curious, mischievous and disruptive. The adults were deadly. The work crews devised all sorts of methods for dealing with the sasquatch, many of them futile.

Will survives the avalanche -- but he finds himself between a young sasquatch and its mother...

The Boundless: The Avalanche

Avalanches were a constant hazard in the mountains when they were building the CPR -- one of the many hardships the workers had to endure.

When Will drives the Last Spike, pistols are fired jubilantly in the air; cheers ring out; and the company locomotive blasts its whistle.

It's avalanche season, and the noise is enough to trigger one.

A lot happens during that avalanche.

Someone tries to steal the golden spike, Cornelius Van Horne is swept over the precipice, and the local wildlife stirs...

(We're almost at the sasquatch part.)

The Boundless: The Golden Spike

It was traditional for 19th century railroads to forge a ceremonial last spike out of gold. They were never left in the ground of course. It was merely for the photo op. After the ceremony it was hastily replaced with an ordinary spike.

 

But in 1885, up in Craigellachie, the last spike was not made of gold. Cornelius Van Horne grandly said that ordinary iron spikes had been good enough to make the railroad from coast to coast -- and an iron spike was good enough to finish it.

 

Which basically meant the CPR was nearly bankrupt and couldn't afford fancy things like gold spikes.

 

That’s not what happens in my world. In The Boundless, the spike is indeed gold, and encrusted with diamonds that spell "Craigallachie."

It is worth more than any worker could make in twenty lifetimes.

There’s no picture of Will driving the last spike. (The CPR keeps that photo quiet. That’s why you haven’t seen it, and never will.)

But up there in the mountains, it's Will who drives that spike.

Too bad about the avalanche...

 

The Boundless: Will Everett

 

This is Will Everett. He's come up to Craigellachie to meet his father who’s been working on the railway for the better part of three years. (Will actually hooked a ride up into the mountains with Van Horne and the other CPR dignitaries in their private train.)

 

And here's a secret about the Last Spike.

 

It isn't Donald Smith who drives it. 

 

It’s Will.

 

You won't find it in any official photos. But after Smith bungles the first attempt, Van Horne offers the hammer to Will. The railway belongs to a new generation and a new century, says Van Horne, and Will should be the one  to drive the spike home. He does so.

The spike is solid gold.
 

 

 

The Boundless: The Last Spike

If you’re Canadian you’ve probably seen this photo.

 

It's 1885 up in Craigellachie, BC. It’s not even a real town. (It’s near Revelstoke.)

 

This is where the tracks coming from the East met the tracks coming from the West, up in the mountains.

 

You can see the workers in the foreground.

 

 

 

The fellow driving the spike is Donald Smith, the President of the CPR. (He actually bent the first spike, and had to do it again. He had a desk job.)

 

Behind him to the left is William Cornelius Van Horne, the General Manager of the railroad and its driving force.

 

To the right of Van Horne, looking like his beard is about to explode is Sandford Fleming, surveyor and engineer.

 

And who is that kid, peeking out to the right of Donald Smith...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, I know who he is in real life... but in my next post, I'll tell you who he is in the world of The Boundless...

(The sasquatch? Look very closely. It's hard to see, but it's there...)

 

 

The Boundless: Leaving the Station

It's huge.

It has to be.

Embarking on its maiden voyage across the continent, The Boundless pulls over 900 cars and more than 6000 people, on a train seven miles long.

 It’s a rolling city.

It carries tycoons and newly arrived immigrants, famous inventors and murderous charlatans. It contains opulent lounges and staterooms, a swimming pool, a cinema, a raucous saloon and a shooting range.

It pulls hundreds of freight cars -- and another eighty belonging to the world famous Zirkus Dante. Inside are acrobats, giants, stilt-walking Siamese twins -- and other wonders of the world, including a sasquatch.

And right behind the massive locomotive is a funeral car containing the remains of the rail baron whose dying wish was to travel forever back and forth across the continent on the train and tracks he masterminded.

* * *

When I was growing up, stories always seemed to take place somewhere else. For me, it was usually England or the United States. Stories could happen in the English countryside, or London, or in New York City, or in Utah or in Mammoth Falls, Wisconsin, but they never seemed to happen much in Canada. It’s changed a lot now, but I still think, as Canadians, we’re not so great at telling our own stories. And especially mythologizing our stories so that they lodge in our memories and even psyches. I used to think history was boring. It had nothing to do with me. Over the years I’ve come across lots of amazing things about our country.

 

One of them was the building of the national railway.

 

Canada is huge. It’s incredibly wide. Imagine building a railway from  coast to coast.

 

Truly, Canada might not have existed as we know it, without the railway. It stitched the  country together. Not only that, the path of the CPR had a huge hand in deciding how the country was going  to be settled and the where the major western cities would rise.

 

 

 

The building of the railway was a truly epic undertaking. Explorers and surveyors spent months and years finding the best routes. Then came making the road, and then laying the steel.

 

 

 

 
 

They had to blast through the endless Precambrian rock of the Canadian Shield north of the great lakes.

 

 

 

 

And then there was the muskeg, hundreds of miles of it,  land so boggy that ton after ton after ton of gravel fill just disappeared into its watery wastes, The muskeg ate gravel and steel. Whole trains were sucked into the depthless morass.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there were the trestle bridges to cross river valleys.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 And then came the Rockies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Work slowed down in the mountains.
 

There were cliffs and gorges and avalanches, dynamite and blasting.

 

There were terrible conditions for the workers, especially for the Chinese workers who were brought in and paid much less than the white men, and given the most dangerous jobs.

 

 

  

But they did it. Despite all the hardships and inequalities, the work was finished in 1885.

 

In my next post: The Last Spike.

 

With sasquatches...