Those Beautiful Streamliners (4)

By   April 17, 2015

On a sunny, late summers day in 1981 we took the gang on a trip up to Saskatoon and back.  We drove, dogs and all, but at least a few people took the train.  Riding in single car, air-conditioned style behind a full baggage and 1750 horses.

The Regina – Saskatoon line would be high speed (medium speed?) corridor in any advanced country.  Perhaps not as fast, or as well used, as a modern, fully functional Calgary – Edmonton line might be but an important part of our transportation infrastructure in any case.  It will come.  The lone roadblock to a high-speed corridor, any high-speed corridors, in both provinces, is pictured at driver’s right.

6504-near-Davidson-SK-May-84VIA FP9A 6504 near Davidson Saskatchewan

But as more and more family farms disappear along with the need for all those convenient rail crossings the landscape is left with only empty, unwanted, home shaped shells.

It would be so great to have the space to build a convincing prairie layout. It would have to be N scale for sure but it would offer the possibly of four or five hundred scale feet on both sides of the track. Broken fences stretch into the distance. A small pond surrounded by willows at trackside and one dusty road – with no cars or trucks – over a single culvert and a single track with just a whistle post and a cross buck to break the horizon. There’s a line of telephone poles parallel to the road though and a sound card under the layout is playing ‘grasshoppers’.