While riding VIA Rail on a Kingston-Toronto round trip this week, I found myself under the Toronto Union trainshed. Old habits and old obsessions die hard. Notepad in hand, I scrawled locomotive and car numbers from my train and trains on adjacent tracks. Having done this every time I'm in Toronto Union, Winnipeg Union or Gare Centrale, it's just something I do.
What for? Why? Is anyone interested in this information? Experience has shown that the answer to that question is...yes! Who knew that all that pencil-pushing and notepad-scrawling would fill my first book's pages? And would fuel my second and third books on VIA Rail? Sometimes there was so much to scrawl in the notepad that it populated pages willy-nilly. But those numbers mean something. They mean history. VIA history. Don't think VIA had history? You'd be wrong, and there are those who are interested and even rabid about it.
Highball!
Eric
