Train Beyond the Mountains by Rick Antonson

Author:Rick Antonson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

— 12 —

CHINESE WORKERS ON THE RAILWAY came to my mind that evening. Many of them were ancestors of my friends. Two days previously, our train had passed over a vertigo-inducing trestle bridge, which had made Marsha, a fellow passenger and retired policewoman, nervous. Like all of us, she tried to imagine the “climbers who dangled from ropes to drill holes” and then prime them with explosives to blast away rock for the path of the tracks. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t all make it to safety before the explosions. “Imagine the Chinese men straddling the bridge beams without a safety harness,” she said. “Companies didn’t offer much worker protection in those days.” She then turned to a few of us and added, “You know, I almost wasn’t born because of a fight over how train companies treated their employees.”

The looks on our faces encouraged her to continue.

“My mother’s father was a staunch socialist from Newfoundland, and my dad was a conservative from Ontario,” Marsha told us. “When my parents got engaged, Mom’s dad hosted a party for them at his house. Over the celebration dinner, he got into a huge argument with his future son-in-law.

“It was 1949, with trains in the transition from coal-fired engines to diesel. As part of those changes, it took fewer people to keep the train running. My grandfather-to-be believed the train company owed it to the men who had stoked the engines to find them other jobs and keep them on the payroll. My father-to-be believed the job loss was simply part of progress, and it was too bad for the workers who lost their jobs. My mother took her father’s side in the disagreement. She got so angry with my dad that she slapped him across the face. He stomped out of the party! Luckily for me, they found a way to reconcile. I was born a year later.”

Marsha had then turned to Riley. “At bedtime, when I was your age, instead of reading us a story from a book, my dad would sit on the end of our bed and sing his kids to sleep with a song. One of his favourites was ‘Working on the Railroad.’ Do you know it?”

Riley nodded his head. Marsha sang. “I’ve been working on the railroad, all my live long days. I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away.”

Brenda and her husband joined in. “Can’t you hear the whistle blowing . . .?”

Workers were the lifeblood of the railway. They were as much a part of its success as the financiers or surveyors. The new province of British Columbia had only 35,000 white settlers (many of them women and children) when the railway’s construction began. Though some labourers were drawn from the Indigenous population, 10,000 workers were needed to keep the work on schedule. The American responsible for the west to east portion, Andrew Onderdonk, contracted with Chinese firms for labourers direct from China. In the winter of 1881–82, he chartered two ships to bring Chinese men from Hong Kong—1,000 on each ship.

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