What follows are some trains of thought, rumbling slowly along, pulled by an enthusiasm that is part industrial archaeology, part nostalgia, part aesthetics.

I am not a railway buff — don't expect accurate minutiae of nuts and bolts here. But I find railways fascinating: the faint traces of a horse-drawn tramway that ran for a few years in the industrial revolution 200 years ago and is now reduced to a fence alignment; the rusty abandoned rails and rotten ties of a defunct North American railroad; the enthusiast-run restored line and even a fully-functional modern railway.

Just as Toad, in Wind in the Willows, sat whispering "Poop Poop!" to himself after seeing his first motor car, so I still chant "Jickety-can Jickety-can" every time I see a train or bump over a level crossing. Sad isn't it...

The first experience I describe is a late winter journey on the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway on Vancouver Island, off the West coast of Canada.

Then I travel from North Vancouver to Prince George, on the B.C. Railway.

In New Brunswick, I ride the Salem and Hillsborough Railroad.

I also muse over rusty rails, my fascination with abandoned and sometimes almost vanished railways.