RAILWAY ARCHAEOLOGY COLLECTION

There is, or certainly was until recently, a piece of railway track embedded in the tarmac of busy Pender Street, in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia.

It is, or was, one of the few remains of the route of part of Canadian Pacific Railways' English Bay Branch that was replaced by a tunnel in 1932.

Ironically the tunnel is now occupied by Vancouver's 20-year-old SkyTrain rapid transit system, so the fossilised rails lasted longer than their replacement.

The parts of Canada and the USA that I've visited and lived in are full of railway archaeology. There seems to be a tradition of abandoning lengths of line and just walking away for a few decades, unlike the overnight and almost indecently quick grubbing up of track that follows closure in my native country, England.

This is especially true of branch lines and sidings (spurs), but in places many miles of railway lie rusting, their sleepers (ties) rotting. And short lengths of track that are inconveniently encased in roadways are left until they absolutely have to be removed.

So what is the attraction of these pathetic remains?

I suppose I regard railways as linear stories.

They involved overcoming civil engineering challenges. They were promoted and built by characters, and sometimes rogues. The navvies who did the hard work sweated into the soil that now bears only scattered ballast, rust-eaten spikes and sleepers rotted to paper-thinness. Often the route has vanished completely as agriculture or nature takes over the track bed. There's some excitement in just tracing and locating where the railway once was, perhaps noticing something that most people pass without recognising.

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