The Canadian Railroad spans 4,000 miles across 10 provinces of the most spectacular scenery on earth.
Trains have attractions that airplanes don't, like putting your head out of the window.
But now this train is coming to the end of the line.
It was a good thing I saw it when I did, because the train I was on isn't running anymore.
Ride the rails with Murray Sale on the last train across Canada.
All aboard!
Presentation of this prog...
...able by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
As a journalist, I've been on the road 40 years. 70 or so countries, all the continents, too many wars and revolutions.
I've got packing down to a fine art.
I was off to a huge, lonely country I'd never had a chance to see.
Partly because not much newsworthy ever seemed to happen there.
Until now.
I was taking the last train to go right across Canada.
The Canadian Railway runs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
4,000 miles of iron road that spans 10 provinces, 5 time zones, swamps, mountains and frozen desert.
It's a trip I've always wanted to make. And then I heard it was closing down for good. It was now or never.
The railway had built this country and tied it together from sea to frigid sea.
What would happen to Canada when it disappeared?
I began my journey in the Atlantic fishing town of Sydney, Nova Scotia.
I've always been rather intrigued by this Sydney because I come from the other Sydney, halfway around the world.
Where are you from?
Sydney.
You're from Sydney and the first time you're in Canada.
Correct.
The real Sydney.
Oh, Sydney, Australia.
You got it.
Oh, you're down there.
Exactly.
You're down there, boy.
You want a card?
Okay.
Got it.
Got it?
Here we are.
Thanks, George.
You're welcome.
Down that way.
Thanks a lot.
That fish was fresh then, but it's a long way across Canada.
Taxily, I dropped it off at the hotel and collected my baggage.
Ladies and gentlemen, VIA Rail Canada's rail liner for North Sydney, Sydney Mines, Port Huxbury, New Glasgow, Stamford, Trinidad, Trinidad, Alla Max, all aboard.
Okay, guys.
You're going to Vancouver?
Vancouver, all the way, sir, yep.
All aboard, up to the left.
Open the doors, open the back door, open the walls.
And even sadder are some of the people who stay behind.
All aboard!
And even sadder are some of the people who stay behind.
All aboard!
And even sadder are some of the people who stay behind.
You pretty guys, look at that!
That's a nice view.
Okay.
And so I joined the migration west from which many passengers never come back.
The songs of these Nova Scotia people seem haunted by this sadness of saying goodbye to the sea.
Oh, Murray's my name.
Murray, my name is Bernice.
Hello, Bernice. Hello, how are you?
And where do you come from?
I come from Newfoundland.
Trains are great for meeting people.
I soon met Bernice from Newfoundland, a Canadian island province they call The Rock.
I was her first Australia.
In fact, Bernice had only left her island home for the first time a few years ago.
When I got off The Rock, when I left The Rock, I was 33 years old when I left The Rock.
For the first time?
Yeah.
I used to think about it when I was small.
What was the outside world like?
What was the other places like?
I was only small, I never travelled.
Are the people different from where I come from, where I'm at?
What about this train? You've been on this one before?
No, this is my first time on a train.
First time on a train? Really? Well, how do you like it?
I think it's great, it's beautiful, it sees all the trees.
You have a great view, don't you?
It is gorgeous, I tell you.
The birch trees and the poplar trees, that's the most trees that ever glows in the woods.
They're the ones that shows off Mother's nature.
It does. And the maple trees, I forgot them.
Yes, there's a lot of maple trees around here. I've already noticed that, yeah.
You did, eh? So now?
Now, this is all new to me, you see. I haven't seen a maple tree before.
You'll never see...
I mean, except from on the flag, there's a maple leaf, but...
You've never seen a maple tree?
I wasn't sure what they looked like.
You don't know what you're missing, my dear.
This train was only a small branch line, an eight hour run that connected up with the main Trans-Canada line.
It collected people in villages along the way, taking them to Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, the big world around the bend.
0-1-0-1-8-15-17.
All alive.
You ready?
Many of these young people were out of work.
Their region is poor and getting poorer, partly because the fishing industry is dying.
Codfish jigging, that's what they're doing. That's what's nice about their codfish jigging.
I used to do that. Yeah, it's so nice when you get someone to jig her.
When you hook somebody, you get them like that.
My friend took me out one time in the boat.
Yeah, it's so fun. It's gorgeous.
It's beautiful, my dear.
Oh, look over there. The ducks. They're geese, I imagine.
Yeah, geese.
They haven't all left yet.
They're still alive.
We crept up over Old Ohio, they stole our barren sheep.
I like to tell you a story and although I make you laugh,
we couldn't take any chances so we had to steal the cow.
The old cow got angry and we woke her from her sleep.
We couldn't take any chances and we went and stole the sheep.
Go Mrs. Pooch.
One, two, three, everybody.
I divide to build a boat and I divide to sail her.
I divide to get the fish to rig and I'm on my own.
I divide to get the fish to rig and I'm on the line.
I don't want your meagre fish, they're no good for winter.
I can get better than that down on the river.
Down on the pier.
Where are you on the pier?
They sounded cheerful.
I thought they were happy to be going back to work in Toronto,
but I was wrong.
There's a lot of people up there, a lot of hustle and bustle.
I didn't like it at all.
You know how your friends are when you're home.
In the community at home, you can go 20 miles easy around the whole place
and everybody's your friend.
Up there you don't know anybody that's sitting next door.
It's totally different.
Everybody's out for themselves up there.
They just look after themselves.
I don't know.
The people that goes away from Newfoundland,
I don't think they should have to go away.
No, I think that's a crime.
There's no jobs.
They've got to go away.
They've got to buy up their homes and they've got to go up there to make a living.
They've got to get the round of employment and they've got to go back again.
I figure years to come nobody's going to be in here.
It's going to be a ghost town.
This train doesn't run anymore.
Soon after my trip, it closed.
It was time to start a little background reading.
Coming up was my first stop and my first Canadian city,
the famous old naval port of Halifax.
300 miles covered, only 3,500 to go.
Berenice had got off one stop earlier, but I'd made another new friend.
His name was Tom Galant, a one-time singer who's now a full-time sailor.
He invited me aboard once I'd looked around Halifax.
People here certainly haven't forgotten where they came from.
Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia, which means New Scotland.
This was British North America.
And at first sight it still looked to me more British than North America.
Canada only got its own maple leaf flag 25 years ago,
and some places still don't seem to have heard about it.
The British war against their rebellious American colonies was fought from Halifax.
Here they don't seem all that pleased that George Washington won.
I could see a Canadian identity was emerging here, but slowly, almost reluctantly.
Perhaps it's because Nova Scotians were comfortable with the British Empire.
In fact, geography's put them a lot closer to Britain than they are to the far-off provinces of Western Canada.
Life in Halifax isn't all fish and chips.
I'd stumbled on the autumn Mardi Gras, a city-wide bash that takes over the whole of downtown.
Some local natives had decided on dinner. Me.
Even a Halifax street party has a certain British respectability.
They say that Canada was founded on the values of peace, law and order, values that came from Britain.
I could still see that law-abiding legacy.
Among 70,000 all-night revelers, only one minor crime was reported, an inept mugger who was arrested the next day.
The next morning I dropped in on the nearby town of Lunenburg to take up my invitation to go sailing.
My friend Tom had found a freedom rare in Atlantic Canada, the freedom to be able to stay at home.
Born here in Nova Scotia, he'd moved to Toronto and become a successful entertainer.
Then he gave it all up to come back to the sea.
Today, Tom's scratching out a living as a part-time skipper, leading tourist cruisers.
He's turned his back on good life for what he thinks is a better one.
I've done a bit of sailing myself. I once crossed the Atlantic alone, so I know a few of the old seafaring traditions.
Oh Murray, speaking of old non-traditions, when we go to sea out here, we take one of these bottles that is here's stuff and we give a drink to the old man.
There you go, buddy. Stay out there.
And then we have one each ourselves.
Welcome aboard.
That's a good, that's a nice blend isn't it? It's a good week.
This is, rum drinking is a big thing in Nova Scotia, huh?
It's the national alternative.
Alternative to what?
To everything. To hell with it, let's get drunk.
When I sail back here, and we're coming in for Lunenberg, the last six hours coming in, I'm in a state of ecstasy that's almost impossible to hold inside my heart, you know, it's so strong.
And there's no, I don't think there is any reason for it, it's just where I belong.
You're coming home.
It's where I belong.
The dream of everybody in Toronto is to move to New York or Los Angeles and be a star.
Yeah.
The dream of everybody in Nova Scotia is to be able to afford to stay here.
That's the difference.
Unlike sailboats, trains run on timetables, and the way the skipper was passing around the rum, I was going to have a hard time catching my train.
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you, away you rolling river.
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.
Away I'm bound to go, across the wide Missouri.
Back on the track.
Now I joined the main line, the transcontinental train to Montreal that was part of the Canadian railway legend.
Up until the 1950s, this was one of the world's most glamorous trains.
In those days, the jet set was the train set, a romantic world of sleeping cars and chance encounters.
Well, what do we don't have in the hallways we have in the bedroom?
Trains have attractions that airplanes don't, like putting your head out of the window.
And if you're learning to count, you can count telephone poles.
The train has lots of scenery, and there's really only one place to view it from, that indispensable Canadian invention, the Dome Car.
It's ideal for seeing a country where practically everyone seems to have been born within the sound of a train whistle.
Oh, I just want to see my house. There it is right over there. My house, the house I was born in. She knows where it is, right over there.
This railway was the great Canadian dream, an iron road driven through an impossible wilderness, and it's much celebrated in Canadian myth and music.
The majestic mountains stood alone against the sun, alone before the white man and alone before the wheel, when the green dark forest was too silent to be real.
For many countries built railways, Canada may be the only one built by a railway.
The train welded Canada together, a steel wedding band uniting the people of the second-grade nation of North America.
The border between Canada and the United States is the world's longest undefended frontier.
But psychologically, Canada was defended by a railway that stretched right along the border, pulling people east and west and barring the way south.
Many Canadians were once Americans who fled the American Revolution.
They wanted to build a second America that would stay loyal to the British crown.
The railway was to be their main line of defense, holding together a new country which combined the boots and stats of the American cowboy with the security of the British red coat.
Before they looked in the future in wonder, they'd see this on iron road running from the sea to sea, bringing the goods to the unbroken land, all up from the sea for ten years.
I was now entering the province of New Brunswick, settled by American refugees passionately loyal to the British Empire.
As I learned from a young man I met on the train.
You've got to remember, a lot of Canadians were on the opposite side of the American Revolution.
They're the United Empire loyalists, and there's a lot of those in Ontario, a lot of people are dissatisfied.
And you think that there's still the feeling of the Empire loyalists strong in Canada?
I think damn right, sir.
I think, you know, the American Revolution was a mistake.
We didn't have the violence, we didn't have the bloodshed, and we've achieved political independence as much as they have, and we didn't have to go through all the violence and chaos at the end.
We never fought a civil war in this country yet, and hopefully we'll never will.
So maybe the Revolution was a bad idea?
I think the American Revolution was a mistake.
You have two sides to a revolution, you have those people who want change, and you have people who don't want change.
And obviously the United Empire loyalists and Canadians that are now are the people that were the conservatives and not part of the revolution, they want to maintain the status quo.
Yeah, I think basically Canadians are a pretty conservative people.
Are you personally conservative?
I don't mean politically, I mean in your own.
Oh yeah, very conservative.
That's part of being Canadian, yeah.
Rolling through the wilderness called for some entertainment, and the passengers supplied it.
The Canadian enthusiasm is not of the knee-snapping variety.
Even here on the Trans-Canadian train, the United States is never far away.
In fact, it's right outside the window.
The Canadian tracks take a shortcut through the American state of Maine, which juts into Canada between Halifax and Montreal, and a US border guard gets on the Canadian train.
What are we doing here?
This is our Canadian American passenger.
I forgot to look who's there.
The guard's job is to make sure all the doors are locked and sealed shut.
Just in case, some reckless Canadian should suddenly fling himself off the train in pursuit of the American dream just outside the window.
It was my first night on the train, and I was curious to try out the Canadian sleeping car.
As it happens, it's a Canadian invention, dating back to 1857, and not much changed since those days.
Next morning, Montreal, Canada's most cosmopolitan city, time for my first sortie into Canadian big city life.
It's the world's second largest French-speaking city, famous for sharp dresses and chic coiffure.
And our big, sophisticated town, where, I've been warned, an immaculate toilette is déragué.
At first glance, this could be the skyline of any big North American city.
Two million people and four million cars.
This is the province of Quebec, the last remaining stronghold of French in North America.
People here just don't speak the same language.
In fact, I was surprised to discover that for over a decade, it's been the law of the province of Quebec that all outdoor signs must be in French only.
These are real French fries.
Signs in English are outlawed, right down to the last apostrophe.
What could be more American than a marathon? But the crowd was cheering them on in French.
I'd heard that many Quebecers were demanding independence under their own flag.
They're led by the Parti Québécois, a movement striving to separate from Canada.
But I had to come here to discover just how deep and widespread Quebec nationalism runs.
No, it's not really for politics. It's like, it's a symbol. Symbol, I don't know how to say that. Symbol. OK, a symbol.
It's ours.
The Parti du Québec. It's the Parti Québécois.
It's because we want the independence for the Quebec. We want to be a country.
Wouldn't that cut Canada in half?
Yes, but we are not, we don't, I don't live in Canada. I live in Quebec. For me, it's, it's my, my country is Quebec. It's not Canada.
To brush up on my Quebec history, I dropped in on Quebec City, the capital of the province just down the line from Montreal.
Here, 95 percent of the population speaks French, a last remnant of the days when the French Empire ruled two thirds of North America.
This place reminded me of the rainy province of Brittany in France, because long ago, that's where most French Quebecers came from.
You don't really feel you're in North America here. You're either in Montmartre or in Hollywood.
But Quebec isn't just famous for French architecture. The future of all North America was decided here on one famous battlefield.
And there's only one way to see it.
Before I get too far, the date of Quebec City, 1608. Founded by Samuel de Champlain.
Look at these houses down in here now, the average, 200 years ago. This is old Quebec. Hello, how are you?
The battle took place, it was 13th of September, 1759. That's where they fought the French and British.
But the battlefield looks more like a park today. But it was here that the French Marquis de Montcalm lost the battle and his life to British General James Wolfe.
Yet the British didn't really win either. With the French threat gone, the American colonies no longer needed British protection.
And so they launched their revolution.
In a sense, both the United States and Canada were born here. While another nation died, the Empire of New France.
Quebec City would have been its Washington.
Perhaps that's why French Canadians are so determined to defend their language and culture in their corner of the world.
In a way, the Battle of Quebec has never ended.
I get real upset and I get real sick.
Basically, we'd like another beer.
This is about the only thing we can do.
And last night in Quebec, I ran into two Quebec newspaper columnists, English columnist Nick Aftemar and French columnist Gerald LeBlanc.
Two hundred years after the battle was over, they were still fighting it.
You don't agree, you don't agree deep down that it's not...
We cannot take that for granted, being a French society in North America.
You have to kind of help, help it and help it a lot.
You don't accept that deep down.
Who is you?
The English speaking people in Montreal.
We accept being a minority, but we'd like to, like all minorities, we'd like to be accepted.
And it's very hard to think that we're respected or accepted when you find that our language on public display and assigned is as poisonous to the majority collective society as the AIDS virus.
You know, I mean, that's the way we made the field.
Are we talking about language or are we talking about politics?
Who's the boss?
We're talking about power.
Power, who's the boss?
Yeah, right.
Okay, now we're discussing who's the boss in Canada or who's the boss in Quebec?
Well, I don't know.
Sometimes I think, you know, the old adage, I don't know if you heard about Canada, they said Canada was a very lucky country that we had access to French culture, American know-how and British politics.
And we ended up with American culture, British know-how, French politics.
So who won the Battle of Quebec?
To an old war correspondent like me, the conflict seemed too friendly to be serious.
French Canadians seemed to have flourished here as if they'd won the Battle of Quebec.
And Canada has gained a unique dual culture that no other country has.
I felt very much at home in both parts of Canada.
I wish they'd stop fighting that old battle because both sides have too much to lose.
Another day, another train.
This is Canada's Ritzius train heading to Canada's glitzius city, Toronto.
They even pass out free televisions.
Yes, good morning. It's Rita Martinow. May I speak to the Annapurri, please? Thank you.
These people are on their way to work, five hours away, in a train that thinks it's an airplane.
And predictably, this is the train that's expected to survive and get even glitzier when the rest of the train system is gone.
Everything here feels rather American, and that seems to trouble some Canadians.
They wonder why they can't have a strong Canadian identity to match that of their neighbour on the other side of the border.
There are some differences that the Canadians feel between themselves and Americans,
but I think part of our concern about Americanism is that we really want to be different.
We haven't quite been able to define what that difference is.
It's always difficult when you're at some international function,
and every country is supposed to sing a song or do a dance which represents their nationality.
Canadians always have a problem.
I mean, they can't do a square dance, that's as American as a Canadian, so we end up singing alouette,
most of us who don't speak French, but beyond singing alouette,
we find it a little difficult to say, now, there's a Canadian song, or there's a Canadian dance, or there's a Canadian piece of theatre.
I was off to meet Canada's foremost railway authority, Pierre Burton,
author of many books on the railway he calls The National Dream.
Burton lives in Toronto.
It was a small town on Lake Ontario with only 1,600 people when the railway was built.
Now it boasts over 3 million.
This is a train for people in a hurry.
They just can't wait to get to the office.
I'd arranged to meet author Pierre Burton in Toronto's Union Station.
He's a big man who took me on a tour of an enormous station that looked more like a cathedral.
It's based on romance. It's based on the great Canadian myth.
Think of it this way, every country has an epic story in their background.
If you look up the Spanish Armada, the French Revolution storming the Bastille,
the American Revolution, the Vortrec, and the Long March,
we're the only one in which there's no blood.
We're the only country in the world in which our great mythic endeavour is the building of a railway.
So there's a kind of a mythical or almost religious quality about the railway then?
Yeah, well look at this building. This is a temple.
It looks like a temple, yeah.
This is based on the Roman baths of Caracalla, they tell me.
It is a temple as all Canadian major railway stations are,
because there was a religion about railways, or at least as you say, a myth.
The Canadians have a different attitude towards railways than most people in the world,
because not only because their railways started in the country,
but because the country is shaped like a railway.
I mean, 90% of our people live within 200 miles of the border,
so what we are, a country for a population point of view, 4000 miles long, 200 miles thick,
with an archipelago of population islands,
and we are perished between enormous barriers, the angry ocean, the white-plumed mountains,
the vast Canadian shield, a thousand miles of rock and musket,
the psychological barrier of Quebec.
So in this country, transportation and communication are terribly, terribly important and romantic.
The train may be romantic, but Toronto certainly isn't.
It seemed to be a bad case of the North American edifice complex.
There's that flag again.
This is where the money came from to build the railway,
an old-fashioned puritanical town where, as the Canadian joke goes, people say,
thank God it's Monday.
Yet I could see that the toil of Dua Torontonians has created the most Canadian of cities,
a tolerant, hard-working town that lets anyone who shares its values share its prosperity.
Toronto made me wonder whether Canadians haven't already found their long-sought identity
in the many identities they've been able to tolerate without crushing.
Cynthia is the owner of a small Toronto store.
Do you think your children feel Canadian?
Well, really. Who is a Canadian anyway?
I haven't been to school here, but I don't really know who is a Canadian.
So when I'm in Toronto, I'm a Canadian, and when I'm in Jamaica, I'm a Jamaican.
I can't figure this out. Who is a Canadian?
I used to hear they say the Indians.
Now you see the whites, they say they are Canadian.
So who is the Canadian?
I guess anybody who lives here is a Canadian.
Well, I'm a Canadian.
I see.
Next day, I caught up with the Trans-Canadian Line just outside Toronto,
joined by some more picturesque passengers.
They were members of the Amish sect, out on a weekend trip and exercising their right of free...
Ahead of me was some of the most spectacular scenery
and some of the most forbidding terrain to face the railway builders.
I just read about a Canadian Prime Minister who said,
People came to Canada to escape history, only to find themselves overwhelmed by geography.
This track was the bravest decision in the railway's history.
The easy route would have been to go south through the farmlands of the United States.
To stay in Canada, they had to blast their way through the Canadian Shield,
a thousand miles of the oldest, hardest rock in the world.
There aren't many towns out here, so the big excitement is the sight of the train.
School kids come out to wave, and the Amish throw them candy.
Good morning! Here's your candy! Candy! Candy! Good morning!
Here we go!
I've been coming up here for five years, and they've been doing this to us every morning.
They stand there with their sign.
Right, and they put up a sign, Good Morning to you.
And you know, it meant an awful lot to us, because we feel that a new morning is a blessing from God.
Get that little red house.
Oh, you missed it. You've got to get it. You have to get it.
Get that rock.
There's another red house way back there.
This is still a famous part of the line, and it lures romantics from all over the world.
I met a man who spent the whole day hanging out at the rear of the train,
relishing the happy days when he worked on a railroad.
I've been a railfan most of my life.
About the happiest year and a half of my life was when I worked for a railroad,
and ever since then I spend what time I can on them.
What really annoys me is that they pay the engineers. I'd pay them if I could do this.
It's just beautiful.
I don't know what it is, the sound, the feel, the smell even of the diesel locomotive.
Any railfan could tell you.
Most of this line is blasted out of solid rock, four and a half billion years old.
30 foot snowdrifts, temperatures of 50 below zero.
I could tie just reading about how they built this line.
This was a stunning achievement, penetrating yet another barrier isolating Canadians from each other
and opening up a harshly beautiful landscape.
What's wrong?
The whole CTC is giving them problems.
It was a good thing I saw it when I did, because the train I was on isn't running anymore.
The Canadian government says passenger service isn't worth subsidising when most people are in a hurry and prefer to fly or drive.
So these slightly faded, elegant stainless steel cars are being shunted off to the retirement yard.
Yet perhaps the government calculations overlooked another purpose of the train.
It was a magic carpet of discovery for generations of Canadians.
So I did it once and I really liked it and I've come back and I've told all my friends about it and I've told Anna about it too.
When I told her we were taking this trip I said Anna, we're going to take the train. It's beautiful, you have to see it.
Just the differences, just the massive differences in one country.
You know, and all you do is just draw, take this train straight along and you'll see the variety.
The accommodations vary.
The room service is acceptable, if you do it yourself.
And the berths are a snug fit.
Yet as I turned in for the night to the soothing click of the rails, I had a nagging thought.
What happens to Canada when the train that built the country stops running?
I expected to see snow in Canada but not in early autumn.
This train had a reputation for fine dining.
Though it's hard to have table manners to match.
Meals are still cooked the old fashioned way. They've obviously never heard of microwaves here.
Hello, hello. I've been pretty good on this train, I thought I'd come and see how you do it. You balance yourself, you seem pretty naturally balanced.
After 26 years you get the maximum.
I suppose after your first million eggs you get to a real feeling for it.
You can't win them all.
Very nice.
Doesn't matter if you're left handed.
I'm sorry Annie, my hand slipped.
That's alright, how far are you going?
To Vancouver.
That's fine, you can come back and give me your hand a little later.
There we are, that's better.
Travelling through this wilderness, I couldn't help but wonder how the people who built the railway got out here, without a railway.
It's surprising that the Canadian West was uninhabited until the railway found a way through.
There are still no roads or towns out here, just a train track.
And as I reached the halfway point of my voyage, here in the midst of the loneliest country on earth, I thought a modest celebration was in order.
This is not wine growing country, but I managed to get my hands on a bottle of Canada's answer to champagne.
It was unpretentious, good preparation for the tough part of my journey still ahead.
This was the last stop before I headed north, and my fellow travellers looked ready for adventure.
We were leaving the city slickers of Toronto far behind.
The only sign of civilisation out here is this train.
It even got a singing baggage man, Bill Hoffmeister.
He's got a car on the telephone, she said I don't say where, but here's where I'm gonna stay.
He's on the midnight train, he knows he's darling and coming home again. Now it isn't easy being alone with all his pain.
He's the watchman on the midnight train.
I'd survived the civilised parts of Canada, now I was headed out into the wilds, north to the Arctic, west over the endless prairies to the Rocky Mountains and the sea.
Pioneer country, opened up by the iron road that was soon to close down.
This was my last chance to see it.
Well his heart is breaking at the rear of the midnight train. He knows he's darling and coming home again.
And it isn't easy being alone with all his pain. But he's the watchman on the rear of the midnight train.
Halfway across Canada, joined the trek into the unkown. Something out there was calling to me. I called back.
Ride the rails from the frozen north to the western shores. Even as I travelled, the morning paper told me the train I was on was closing down behind me.
Murray's sail rolls into the sunset on the last train across Canada. Well it certainly wasn't Florida.
While it's no longer possible to ride the rails continuously from the Atlantic to the Pacific in Canada, sections of this once mighty line still exist.
The sun
long before the white man
long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real
And many other dead men
too silent
to be real
The presentation of this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial support from viewers like you.
Halfway across Canada, joined the trek into the unkown. Something out there was calling to me. I called back. Ride the rails from the frozen north to the western shores. Even as I travelled, the morning paper told me the train I was on was closing down behind me.
Murray's sail rolls into the sunset on the last train across Canada. Well it certainly wasn't Florida.
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I was out in the wilds waiting to catch the last train that went right across Canada.
But by the look of the station, the line had already closed down a long time ago.
I'd just about given up hope when
So far I'd covered the eastern half of this enormous country. Now I was heading west through the Rockies to Vancouver and the Pacific. After a detour north to the legendary Hudson Bay.
It was 4000 miles of rugged pioneering territory inhabited, I imagine, mostly by beavers, Mounties and moose.
And this wasn't the Orient Express.
Out here they don't seem to bother with sissy stuff like platforms and steps.
And so I was off into the Canadian wilderness on the train that had opened up the country and was about to close down. I felt more like an explorer than a journalist in this harshly beautiful land.
Because no one lives out here and the trains not exactly crowded either.
No bigger than a DC-3. There are about 45 passengers or something like that.
I'll have to fly my Learjet in there then. Can I handle that?
It's $14.
Canada was first explored by French Canadian fur trappers, moving north and west in search of beaver, one of Canada's national symbols.
There's still way more beaver than people out here, which makes it tough to run a railroad.
Beaver dams can wash away the track and even wreck a train.
I learned this from George Karasek, who's been hired by the railway to protect it from the beavers.
Who do you work for, George?
I work for Algoma Central Railway.
I see. I'm what, blowing up these dams?
Well, it's nuisance beaver control. That's my official title is Beaver Battalion.
Beaver patrolman? That's right.
What's wrong with the beaver dams? They damage the railway?
Yes. I asked the engineer for some pictures of the washouts.
When you see engines laying on the side and 20 cars bound on the top of it.
All caused by a few beavers? That's right. Maybe just one only.
George was just starting his day's work.
He invited me to get off at the next station and give him a hand.
Out here, many people still use canoes.
But George is a very good driver.
But George and I were travelling by railroad.
This section of track has been washed away repeatedly and George and I were off to find the guilty beaver.
Holy shit, I have a deep hit.
George took me to a dam he'd already demolished several times.
Each time the beavers had rebuilt it.
Now it was a choice, the train or the beaver.
In this case, we just cannot talk the beaver out of it to move some place else.
So we have to remove them by traps.
If you want me to, I'll show you how it works.
For instance, this is a beaver's head.
Beaver comes swimming down here with a handful of mud.
George showed me how to trap a beaver, but I got the feeling he'd rather have one as a friend.
What's your opinion then of the personality of a beaver, George?
I think it's rather admirable because a beaver is a very industrious animal.
They can make something out of nothing.
There was nothing here before and they made a dam and they made their own home.
It's almost like some of the Canadians, including myself, you move someplace where there's nothing and you make your own home.
I never actually sighted a beaver, but I hope to do better with another Canadian symbol, the moose.
My guide was moose calling champion Gerald Dupré.
What you can do is pretend you're walking. It's another moose walking in the water.
And then what happens, the female usually pees.
Do you need talent for this? Is it like an opera singing?
No.
Anybody you think can do it.
That would work. It would really work.
For a really desperate moose.
No, no. Go like this, pinch your nose and start low and then bring it around.
I wondered why they were laughing.
That's all right.
My technique must have needed a little polish.
I knew there were a lot of moose out there and my trip was far from over.
Somewhere in Canada, there had to be the moose for me.
Attention, train number 421, the little bear for destination, Lockes and Trek, Burntwood, Beaverpond, Call Rapid, Moose River, Moose City, all aboard.
Back in civilization in the town of Cochrane, Ontario.
This train is called the Polar Bear Express.
It turned out to be a freight train with one passenger car.
It was loaded with groceries, machinery, booze, all the basic necessities of life for the small towns north of Cochrane.
It carries everything except cars because no road runs north of here. Only the iron road I was riding.
The Polar Bear Express isn't the world's fastest train, but it's had a song written about it.
The composer is Lawrence Martin, a Cree Indian who loves to ride the train himself.
There are no settlements out here, just the odd cabin in the camp of hunters.
They dropped off one week and picked up the next, often with a fresh moose for the baggage cab.
This is home for John Lavec, who lives here 50 miles from his nearest neighbour, along with 12 dogs and 20 cats.
Like many along this route, he seemed to be searching for solitude.
We'd only stopped for a moment, but I was curious about his life out here.
He was a good boy, he was a good boy.
This is the last time John Lavec would hear a human voice, until the next train came by four days later.
The passengers are on their way home from a 24-hour shopping marathon.
For some, a first taste of life in the big city.
The train stocks up the small communities along the track.
The train's snack bar serves as a mobile candy store for kids.
It's the only shop in town.
This northern branch line is still running, because without it the whole region would die.
But people are worried about the closing of the main line, which feeds it.
The train is the only reliable link with the outside world.
And if this train dies, so will the settlements it serves, like Coral Rapids,
a one-house town in the middle of nowhere, where the train only stops when there's somebody to stop for.
It's a long trip.
There's a lot of miles to cover and a lot of time to kill.
An Indian sculptor used the train as a rolling workshop.
And my seatmate was working at her family business, embroidering moosehine.
Yes, I go hunting with my husband and we wait for hours and hours for geese to come.
So we just look around and see our binoculars and geese would come by.
Like my husband's got poor sight, see, in his eyes.
And he uses me for a binocular sometimes and I see them from far coming, eh?
But I never kill a moose, though.
But I see my husband kill a moose quite a few times.
Aha! There were lots of moose loose around here, waiting for my call.
In fact, the end of the line turned out to be a town called Moosene, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
Next morning, there was no genuine wildlife to be seen, just a small community of 1,400 people.
It turned out to be one of the oldest settlements in all of Canada.
For three centuries, the Cree Indians who live here have traded furs with the Hudson's Bay Company.
It's quite an up-to-date little settlement.
It's even got a street and a school bus, and both stop at the edge of town.
But the Cree cling stubbornly to their traditions.
In many backyards, they were roasting geese and baking Indian bread,
to the sound of tape-recorded tribal powwow music.
With a couple of days between trains, I got an intriguing invitation
to a Cree religious ceremony on the edge of Hudson Bay.
That night, on a lonely island, I found myself crouching in a huddle of Cree Indians
preparing for an ancient tribal ceremony.
The Indian name for it is Sweat Lodge.
It was led by Bob, a university-educated medicine man.
This Sweat Lodge was given to us through the Creator.
He created the willows that we're going to be using.
He created the rocks that we're going to use.
He created the water that we're going to use.
There's nothing there that he didn't create.
And he also created us.
We're just using what our ancestors created.
We're just using what our ancestors were given for generations.
And it's coming back.
And it's young people like ourselves that are very into it.
And it's up to us to carry this on.
One by one, shadowy figures appeared, then disappeared into a kind of darkened hut.
Cameras are not allowed to record the ceremony, but I was invited to take part.
In the sub-zero temperature, I stripped to my undershorts and crept back 10,000 years in time.
What happened inside?
It was pitch black, apart from some glowing red-hot stones.
I was handed an Indian peace pipe, took a puff and passed it on.
In the darkness, someone ran hands over my sweating body in a kind of faith healing.
Yet it was strangely moving, too, for I glimpsed something I had to come to Canada to find.
The possibility that people can preserve their traditional ways,
distinct from other cultures around them, yet respect each other enough to share one country together.
It was an inspiring vision, or perhaps it was only a dream.
Another day was another world.
I had travelled south, then west, and caught another train.
The Iron Road was taking me even further north, to Churchill, on the doorstep of the Arctic.
What's it like out there? It's wintery.
It's a Canadian scene.
Well, it certainly wasn't Florida.
This part of Canada is big and bleak and barren, and again, only one thing holds it together.
I lunched with Dan Gurevich, the world's leading photographer of polar bears,
and Eric Luke, a staff sergeant of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
I didn't want to be stationed in Churchill when I was posted there.
I didn't have a choice in going, and I really resented the fact I was up there.
And when I got there, I found out that it was nothing like I thought it would be.
Time almost stands still up there.
You don't march the same drum you do anywhere else, because weather controls all.
And as frustrating as that may be, there's a magical mystery about it, and it's fun.
Outside, the telephone poles were practically horizontal, because the ground is permanently frozen.
The stunted trees barely survive.
And the people who live out here seem just as tenacious.
Most of this town was heading north to do their shopping.
And there was delivery service for those who stayed behind.
Hey, fellas. Yeah, oh yeah, they're like, they're fighting here.
Oh, just scraps from the kitchen. Bread and bacon, you know, strong enough, fresh steak.
I'll take after them.
Life is hard out here. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood once wrote that while the American ethic is based on winning,
it's not about winning.
It's about winning.
And that's what I'm always trying to tell you, that you can't win.
You've got to win.
And if you can't win, you've got to win.
Margaret Atwood once wrote that while the American ethic is based on winning,
the Canadian one is based on survival.
In this part of Canada, I can see what she meant.
Seizoned passengers settled in for the night.
But for some of us this was all new.
As we rolled further and further north,
a strange restlessness. Something out there was calling to me. I called back.
Next morning we left the last tree behind. This is a desert in the deep freeze. Ahead
was the end of the line. Churchill, polar bear capital of the planet.
This remote town was once a thriving port, shipping Canadian wheat directly to the Soviet
Union across the Arctic Sea. These days, business is slow and only a few ships come in each
year before Hudson Bay freezes over. The population is shrinking and eventually there may be no
one left, but the native people have lived here for more than 10,000 years.
Most people in town were tourists, here to see the other species that's been gathering
on the edge of Churchill since long before the town was built. But before I went looking
for bear, I needed the right equipment. Hello. Hello Penny, how are you? How are you Dan?
We hug down south. I have a problem Penny, cold ears. Oh, I guess you're going to have
to buy some earmuffs. Let's try a hat. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
We hug down south. I have a problem Penny, cold ears. Oh, I guess you're going to have
to buy some earmuffs. Let's try a hat. Okay. Okay. You like that one with a tail, eh? Well,
what do you think? Oh, you look like the original Davy Crockett. See the problem is I can't
now put my own hat on really, can I? Oh no. Look at the little guy on there, he looks
great. Let's go to the earmuff for a doll. Let's try it. Okay. How decadent do you want
to be here? We've got Norwegian blue foxes, we've got mink. How about some coyote? That
would match the rough on your jacket there. It's me. It's you. Yeah, you like those? Okay,
good. I think that solves the problem. And so I was off to look for bear. Sixteen of
them were cooped up inside a polar bear jail, built to detain impulsive bears who wander
into town uninvited. Eventually these jail bears would be turned loose. For now they're
locked up in the cooler. But there's plenty more where they came from, right on the edge
of town. These bears looked quite friendly, but some locals were there to make sure they
didn't get too friendly. A playful tap from a 1200 pound polar bear could be distinctly
hazardous to your health. When one brawny Bruin came too close, visitors were asked
to step inside while experts kept the peace. Okay, people that are not essential, maybe
more than that, they're not allowed to come in. They're not allowed to come in. They're
not allowed to come in. They're not allowed to come in. They're not allowed to come in.
They were only firing blanks, but fortunately the bears didn't know that. Seeing these
handsome beasts relaxing in the sunshine reminded me of their unfortunate colleagues doing time
back in the jail. Okay, wakey wakey, rise and shine. Winter's coming, I'll be out soon.
Sixteen bears and not a growl. It didn't make sense. Suddenly it did. The bears weren't
asleep and they certainly weren't dead. They were zonked out on tranquilizers. The Canadian
Wildlife Service was running them out of town. It was Operation Bear Lift. They fly three
bears at a time. They're transported a couple of hundred miles out of town. Hopefully when
they wake up they won't walk straight back. And speaking of leaving town, I had a train
to catch. I was heading back for the sunnier south, entertained by Bill Hoffmeister, the
singing baggage man. Nobody saw me leaving, it was the only thing to do. Started riding
on the rock and top of a boxcar painted blue. Well there must be a lot of pain inside my
head. To have the rock and top of a boxcar painted blue become a bed. Everything's so
confusing, I can't believe it's true. How could everything go and change so much, simply
losing you. Like a man gone blind, I've been trying to find the end of a tangled thread.
Starting with the angry things you said. And now I'm quiet aside, rolling in the night
with a ring that can thaw my hat. Going a broken heart, don't care about it. Busted
for that. One more round, that's it. Okay. 30 hours and a thousand miles later, I was
back among the bright lights, but I had no time to lose. There's a big steel rail, train
rolling down the tracks. I had left the frozen north of Churchill far behind and rejoined
the main Trans-Canadian line leading west towards the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific
Ocean. As dawn broke, the snow and the trees had vanished and I was under the enormous
sky of the prairies. It was the wheat growing province of Saskatchewan and my next stop,
a town called Swift Current. It was six in the morning in Swift Current. Not much
to see. Not many people about except some Hutterites, members of religious farming
community whose principles obviously include getting an early start. The prairies
isolation from the outside world seems to have helped them preserve their way of life.
Maybe it's the same isolation that makes radio so popular out here. Art Warman is
the king of prairie radio. Oh, it's a great job. You know, you hear the kind of music
you like and you sing along and... From his wheelchair, Art runs Saskatchewan's most
popular radio show. It's called the Tractor Line because many of his regular callers are
listening in their tractors. Right now though, let's go to the Tractor Line and see
if we got... Hello there. How are you doing today? My golly, if it isn't Aubrey Putnam.
How in the world are you doing, Aubrey? Well, we're doing alright here, you know. You
and Aggie, right? Well, Aggie said to phone you up. He's out on the tractor right now
doing a little fall tilling, you know. Alright. She's got her radio on and you're
coming in pretty good on her tractor there. Well, that's good. Anyway, she's going to
be coming in pretty soon. She's got to get the turkeys in before dark or they start
roosting in the neighbor's trees, you know. These are the youngest looking towns I saw
in Canada. In fact, there's nothing older than the railroad out here because settlers
had no way of getting here until the railway connected the prairies to the outside world.
To a visitor, this is the part of Canada that looks most like the United States.
There is no natural separation at all between the wheat lands of the two countries.
But this train defied geography.
By taking the almost impossible route east-west. Canada's patriotic direction.
The rails tied the Canadian prairies to the oceans and to world markets and stitched
Canada together as one country.
Now the train service to many of these towns was being closed down.
And I couldn't help but wonder.
What protected western Canada from the powerful pull of its southern neighbor
now that the east-west link is broken?
This train no longer carries cattle out of prairie towns like Mancota, Saskatchewan.
Today they go by truck and many of them go south to markets in the US just a few miles
down the road. In fact, I had to look hard to see that this wasn't the American Midwest.
Not only do these cowboys look the same as their southern neighbors,
it turns out they dislike the same people.
The all-powerful eastern banks and supermarket bosses who set the prices here.
I could see American and Canadian cowboys use the same silent language.
And you'd better understand the language. One false move and you could wind up
earning 5,000 pounds of T-bone steak.
These people live so far from the rest of Canada and so close to their American neighbors
that national lines can get blurred.
People are saying the same thing as us, the same problems.
They have their problems with the government all in the east.
The west gets the short end of the stick the same way.
Instead of the border going east and west, it should have went north and south.
It wouldn't matter to me if Canada were to become a part of the states.
I think being an American would be just as great as being a Canadian.
And so I headed west again, rolling along beside the U.S. border with a nagging thought.
On the map, Canada looked so solid. On the ground, it felt so fragile.
Perhaps the only thing really Canadian out here was this train.
And even as I traveled, the morning paper told me the train I was on was closing down behind me.
Towns that owed their very existence to the railway, Swift, Curran, Madison Hatten, Moosejaw
would soon have no train at all.
One of the first casualties was going to be our engineer who'd given his life to the railway.
I came to Madison Hatten. I was 17 years old looking for a job.
October 22, 1947, I started from the railway.
This railway right here, Fasten your service, is the history of this country.
It's the railway that made this country. All these farms out here, originally these people came on the railway.
Crossing Canada by train, I felt I was sitting in the seats of the pioneers.
The train was a rolling classroom, teaching generations of Canadians their history and geography.
Do you think you'd like to eat one of those for your breakfast?
Yeah, they're just like shredded wheat.
Put that on your plate. You'd have to have lots of milk, eh? You'd have to have a whole cow.
Yeah.
Even the endless Canadian prairies do have an end.
A full day out of swift current, we sighted a line of mountains growing out of the horizon, the legendary Canadian Rockies.
Beaver. Beaver, yeah. Just like Jesse's beavers, eh?
The train was filling up with some new and interesting faces.
These Japanese tourists filled a whole car.
These are the mountains that made this train world famous, or maybe the other way round.
And I was pulling into the railway's most famous stop.
Banff will be your next stop.
Anyone who's heard of Canada has heard of Banff, an elegant European-style spa that's been a playground of the international train set.
The aristocrats, ordinary millionaires, and other members of the ruling class have been taking the waters here since the days of Queen Victoria.
But who, I wondered, comes here now?
Banff is still a magnet for tourists looking for elegant living and beautiful scenery, but now they come across the Pacific instead of the Atlantic.
Many of them are opening businesses and settling in.
As always, the new pioneers are getting a friendly welcome from the natives.
Banff seemed like a good chance to pick up a souvenir of Canada, although that one was a bit big for my suitcase.
Instead, I chose the Japanese tourists' all-purpose favorite, a beaver dressed in a mountie uniform.
How much is this?
It's 20 dollars.
I had an opportunity to try some Japanese, since the salesgirls spoke little English, despite 8 dollars in Canada.
They told me that was part of the reason they liked it here.
They could escape the big city pressures of Japan and create a home here speaking Japanese all day in the Canadian mountains.
Before I left Banff, I had a stroke of luck.
With time running out, I was still keen to test my moose-calling skills.
These beasts, whatever they were, looked like a receptive audience.
All I risked was a little embarrassment.
It was the story of my life.
Don't call us, we'll call you.
And so I left on the final leg of my journey, through the last and greatest of the railway's trials, the crossing of the Canadian Rockies.
Here he comes, it's the railroad!
The conductor, Lloyd Metcalf, had been giving a running commentary on the trip through the mountains for a quarter of a century.
That's the mountain that's on the back of your 20 dollar bill right now.
Lake Louise would be right over here and this is behind and we'd come up and around.
But that's the one that's on the back of our 20 dollar bill today.
He spent much of the trip giving the official time from the Railwayman's pocket watch.
Meanwhile, up in front, a young man was living out every boy's fantasy.
He was playing with a real train.
Now you see that white thing there?
That one on the side of the track, on the side there.
That's a whistle, a W whistle.
Push that down too long.
Short little one.
Now a long one.
That's it.
Push this down as long as you can.
Now see how we're coming into the tunnel right ahead of us here?
Coming right in.
Now don't you get scared, young lad, because we're coming right in over there.
Isn't this nice?
Look at all the scree, that's what they built that for.
You see the snow shed behind?
We've just come underneath it like a tunnel.
They built that because all the scree comes down and keeps going onto the railroad.
Is that mama?
But a steam engine was sort of like it was alive.
You always treated it as such.
We had to shovel coal when I first started.
The crack of the stack, the working and the exhaust.
You go through the country at night and that old steam engine was really barking, you might say,
and just made you feel like it was alive.
I guess them days are gone.
This renowned train through the Rockies will continue to operate one day a week,
but only in summer as an expensive package tour.
The regular passenger service was terminated shortly after my trip.
The train that plied its way through the Canadian Rockies every day for a hundred years
has made its last regular run.
Last night on the train there was a subdued atmosphere.
Some of the staff were wearing black armbands.
This black armband symbolizes not only the end of my career,
it symbolized the death of an arrow in rail traffic.
It's an institution.
I remember as a kid, we grew up, my mom and dad lived on the CPR main line.
I remember as a kid standing out there watching the Canadian flash by when it was brand new
and they had the half doors open and all the porters were out, all dressed in white, decked in white,
they looked so great and I always thought, when I grew up I'd love to work on a railroad.
Little did I know that 30 years later I'd be doing it.
30 years of history, because they don't think they're making money.
Do we have to make money to keep something like this going?
Governments all over the world piss money up the wall on a lot more frivolous things than a national railroad.
I just can't believe that they would destroy the national dream.
It's disgusting.
I gotta go to work.
There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run
when the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun.
My last morning on the train and already the long trip seemed like a dream.
Had I really seen moose and mounties, prairies and polar bears?
Had I prayed to the great spirit with the Cree Indians and gone trapping with a beaver loving patrol officer?
Did all this exist in one country, let alone one train ride?
A trip that could never be done again.
Canada has always seemed a bit of a miracle.
It seemed even more so now that the railway that built it was closing down.
What I wondered was the country's future.
Would it tear apart at its political seams?
Drift fragment by fragment into the arms of its giant neighbour?
Or fulfil its promise?
A new nation conceived in compromise and dedicated to the proposition that different cultures can prosper together and none be overwhelmed.
Next, Vancouver.
The long trip was over, perhaps forever.
I'd started at the Atlantic and reached the Pacific, a whole continent away.
In all, I'd travelled more than 7,000 miles.
My own home in Australia was far across the sea, but I felt very much at home here too.
I suspected I'd fit in well, make quite a good Canadian.
Somewhere inside me, I still heard the call of the wild.
And someday, I'm going to get it right.
Oh, the song of the future has been sung.
Oh, the babbles heard in the world.
While it's no longer possible to ride the rails continuously from the Atlantic to the Pacific in Canada, sections of this once mighty line still exist.
Without teardrops and a toil.
For the wolf time has fell and the river did not grow.
And the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun.
Long before the white man and long before the wheels.
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real.
And many other did live.
Too silent to be real.
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