There are moments in your life when your senses are especially acute and which always remain in your memory. One such moment for me was sitting on a beach in the dark in West Vancouver in 2000. That summer, I attended an international academic conference in Seattle. I brought my wife and children with me to expand the conference into a family holiday. We found cheap flights to Vancouver, hired a car, and explored the Vancouver area before driving South of the border to stay in the University District of Seattle. After the conference, we returned North via a ferry to Sidney on Vancouver Island, travelled up the Island and then returned via the Sunshine Coast to Vancouver. This was followed by a circular tour around a small part of the Lower Mainland.
But the first part of the holiday coincided with the Celebration of Light - an international firework competition held every year in Vancouver. We watched from one of the beaches (Dundarave Park or Millennium Point?) on the North Shore. In the dark, we could just see other spectators, all quietly sitting and watching the fireworks on the other side of the dark waters of English Bay. While we watched, we heard a vast freight train, half a mile long, slowly rumbling out on the railway line behind us. We then saw it in the flashes of the fireworks. The train was heading from the City’s docks, going West so that it could go East. After passing West Vancouver, it would have headed North past the Coast Range, past Whistler, and by daylight would have reached the rail junction at Prince George. From there, it might have headed on Canadian National tracks East to Winnipeg and Chicago, carrying the good of the Orient across the continent.
