The Americas

  Canadian Pacific, take me to my baby’s arms.”

  Apart from the fact that Hamilton was a little out on his geography (the distance from St John’s, Newfoundland, where his journey starts, to Vancouver, BC, where his journey ends, is over 7000 km, or around 4500 miles), it is a rail journey that no longer can be made, at least on Canadian Pacific tracks – there are no more trains in Newfoundland (and those that once were there were owned by Canadian National, not Canadian Pacific), and Canadian Pacific has long stopped any passenger services.

  Nonetheless, Canada as a country simply wouldn’t exist as it does today if it wasn’t for the railway. These songs will forever be a reminder of that.

  EPILOGUE

  Our odyssey ends – but what an incredible journey it has been! We have circled the world, almost reached the Antarctic at the tip of South America, and the Arctic in northern Russia, Finland and Canada. We have been below sea level in the Middle East, and crossed the roof of the world in both Tibet and the high Andes. In each case, we have encountered the railway – in fact, some of these places can only be reached by the railway.

  We have seen railways used in times of war – and even been the instigator of wars. We can only surmise as to whether the track gauge differences between the railways of warring countries – or parts of countries – would have changed the very world we live in, in such countries as Germany, Russia and America, if such gauge differences had not existed.

  Our trains have been slow, such as on the narrow gauge railways on plantations in Australia and elsewhere; and fast, such as the 300 to 400 km/h high speed lines in Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere. We have encountered steam, diesel and electric motive power; remote railways in some of the world’s most inhospitable regions, as well as the densest of networks in the world’s largest cities; and everything from small hand-propelled carts in Vietnam to 10 000 t freight trains consisting of hundreds of wagons, in America, Canada, Australia and Africa. Our railways have been underground, on dedicated rights-of-way, on city streets, and elevated high above those streets.

  One common element unites them all – flanged steel wheels running on steel rails, with the rails a set distance apart. That element of course is what this 7-Part book has been all about. The gauges of these rails have ranged from 381 mm to 1829 mm, but Standard gauge – 1435 mm – makes up by far the majority of the railways we have travelled on, and is to be found, even if only to the smallest extent, in virtually every country we have visited.

  I hope that you, the reader, will have found something both useful and of interest within these electronic pages. If some of the pictures and illustrations are perhaps not up to the quality you might see in a printed book, I hope you will forgive me – the electronic e-reader is not, to be perfectly honest, the most suitable medium for reproducing high quality pictorial material. Nonetheless, I hope that you will have gained much more than if words alone had been used.

  Michael Frewston

  © Frewston Books Online 2016.