SALMON ARM, BRITISH COLUMBIA

This lovely town (actually it is a 'city') is located in the Shuswap area in central British Columbia (north end of the Okanagan Valley). It is my home-town which I left in 1963 to head off to university and then the other side of the world.

The town grew up on the Canadian Pacific Railway which was completed in 1885. This town is a good example of how the railway united the whole country and opened up the west to settlement. Everybody came from somewhere else and made a new life for themselves; it is these good people who form the backbone of the nation.

Salmon Arm CPR station and platform

The CPR station, now closed, lies on my route, across these tracks in the foreground, to the Front Street stores. It was never the most salubrious part of town being 'the wrong side of the tracks' but has now been 'developed'. Long, long trains carrying grain and raw materials to the port of Vancouver head west and long, long trains carrying containers of manufactured goods head east 24 hours a day. There is only one passenger train The Rocky Mountaineer which passes once a day and you can set your watch by it.

Canoe Beach Crossing*

As children we had a game of placing a penny on the tracks near Canoe Beach. We would climb back over the fence and wait for the train to come by, wave to the engine driver and the man in the caboose, then scamper back to retrieve the flattened penny.

To this day I cannot cross the tracks without leaving a penny!

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* Canoe Beach Crossing photo taken by Alastair MacLeod. Permission given.