Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 22 - Getting the Whole Country Railed (Part 1)
60 Plays8 days ago
Choo choo! I am a train! All aboard!
In this episode, Heather takes Tam on a small journey introducing the concept of the steam locomotive and railroads and how they were invented, built, and then eventually showed up in Canada including a big project to convince the a province to be made part of a newly-formed Dominion.
We missed you all! It is safe to say that this is season 2.
If you like our work, check out our Patreon for bonus episodes and Discord access!
http://patreon.com/shawiniganmoments
Comments?
mailbag@shawiniganmoments.ca
Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
Recommended
Transcript
Email Mishap and Laughter
00:00:00
Speaker
So on the subject of local stuff. Yeah. I've been holding on to this for a while. I didn't want to bring this up back in January because i wanted to save it for normal cold openings because. And then I entered into a protracted period of crunch time and there was no February episode.
00:00:18
Speaker
Or March. Or March. Damn near almost no April. so Sorry, everyone. This is in an email to a guy named Kevin that I sent.
00:00:30
Speaker
I asked him. This is dated July 1st, 2025 at 9.06 p.m. So you can tell that um I definitely was thinking about something on this at the beginning of the year.
00:00:43
Speaker
You sent it from the future? January 5th. Sorry, January 2025. You said July. you said july Did I say July? Whatever. It's fucking April.
Unreleased Show 'Agent Unbreakable'
00:00:54
Speaker
Hi there. My name is Heather and I'm one half of a podcast called Schwinnigan Moments.
00:00:59
Speaker
I'm working on an episode that may end up. Oh, what the hell? Fucking mail.app just completely truncated my whole email. Here we go. Cool. had to make This is why I'm glad I have a stupid widescreen.
00:01:12
Speaker
one half of a podcast called Schwinnigan Moments. I am working on an episode that may end covering a show you produced. And i have noticed that despite details about it with an accompanying trailer released in 2021, it seemingly never ah made, was never made available anywhere.
00:01:31
Speaker
Could you shed some light on this? Is there somewhere where we could watch this show? Do you know what the show is? No.
00:01:42
Speaker
Good morning. Thanks for your inquiry of Agent Unbreakable. This show was postponed during COVID and there is no set date to pick it back up. Best of luck in the new year, Kevin, producer.
00:01:58
Speaker
I am going to... This is the only podcast that probably has regularly brought up Layla Yang. never done an official episode about her.
00:02:10
Speaker
Right. yeah ah And yet, and yet I can, we'll never be able to watch this show because supposedly they postponed it post COVID, but they made this whole trailer. had like backstory and everything. And,
00:02:25
Speaker
What? Lily Ng claims he's an actress. I solemnly. Yeah, she's an actress, but no released material. What gives? Next, you're going to claim you're a real estate agent.
00:02:37
Speaker
And a TED Talker. And a TED Talker, even though like that got taken down as well. You were too embarrassed. The TED Talk is she's no longer affiliated with it.
00:02:49
Speaker
I have no idea. I don't really fucking care what she's doing. i It was an update on the Leila Yang lore ah like ah many episodes ago.
Piracy for Preservation
00:03:00
Speaker
I solemnly swear if we do ever actually get a hold of any material for it, it's going right onto the torrent sites.
00:03:09
Speaker
We don't advocate for piracy around here. Yes, I do. I work in media. I work in game dev. Piracy is preservation. pirate your games, support your support the developers the people who create them.
00:03:24
Speaker
Also, make sure that shit stays around forever in perpetuity. We can't rely on archive.org, although bless them. One of my very good friends works for archive.org. Yeah, but they're a single point of failure, so your best throw everything you got on Torrent.
00:03:42
Speaker
That's fair. Well, nonetheless, we will unfortunately never have a chance to watch Agent Unbreakable I just I just want to know.
00:03:53
Speaker
i just want to know what happened with the show. Like, it's just he just says, like, we just dropped it post post COVID. Like, when was it filmed? That's the thing.
00:04:04
Speaker
I want to know things about this story. And like short of me contacting all the real estate agents involved, like I don't want to message Layla Yang. I feel like that's just inviting trouble.
00:04:17
Speaker
But like if I start contacting everybody at the realist agency, like I feel like that might invite some... I don't know. She might put us on blast, but actually might be a good thing. What?
00:04:30
Speaker
We're not trying to harass Leila Yang. We just want to know what this TV show is all about. No, no, no. But i what I'm saying is I'm 100% certain that Leila Yang would harass us.
00:04:42
Speaker
ah Well, you know what? This would have made a killer season two opener. Yeah. we were If we just open it up with but like an episode about Leila Yang. But I guess we'll just have to do a normal episode for once.
00:04:56
Speaker
There's still time. Yeah. so Shall we start?
Podcasting Challenges and Support
00:05:00
Speaker
uh yeah sure uh bienvenue uh showin again moments je m'appelle tamarack oh no welcome to showin again moments my name is heather and i use she or they pronouns uh guten avand is heise tamarack my uh hi i'm tamarack my pronouns are it it's or they them well this is a episode that we haven't been able to do for a while has it uh and whose fault is that oh it's mine it's my fault uh yeah turns out crunch time and podcasting don't mix
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, we both have day jobs, like actual jobs that, you know, pay our, know, our living expenses. If you want to like pay us a lot of money to not have to do like crunch or other absurd things, feel free to subscribe to the Patreon and then maybe we could do something about it.
00:06:09
Speaker
and i am never going to make podcasting my job i think i would know i go insane i think i would lose it too i need a job that actually lets me it makes me leave the house like i've seen what podcaster madness does to a person i having experienced covet lockdowns i'm good with like not working out of my home every day ever again like you know i like being around other human beings See, that we don't agree on because I've been working i've been working room like fully remote since 2017.
00:06:40
Speaker
my You can take my home office from my cold, dead hands. It's definitely a very different time from the last episode.
Canadian Political Landscape
00:06:51
Speaker
we In the last episode, we had...
00:06:53
Speaker
We did a whole special on Pierre Polyev and ah Justin Trudeau had resigned. And now um we have an election that's been called by.
00:07:04
Speaker
Well, I fucking called it. I said it was going to be Mark Carney as leader of the Liberal Party. also was so fucking obvious. It was going to happen. been i But like I had been calling this since like fucking August when his name started being announced. It's like there's no way in hell that he doesn't end up becoming leader.
00:07:20
Speaker
and like Because the liberal establishment got pissed off about ah Christia Freeland, ah who, full disclosure, i think is a vile, terrible person, but who supports vile, terrible policies and also has a Nazi grandfather.
00:07:39
Speaker
That's not why she wasn't going to be in the running. She stepped out of line. yeah uh and that that sunker and then karina gold uh i don't know maybe give ah maybe times will be different but i i think that one's just sexism there's some real but there was like couple there was that one psychopath that was trying to run for liberal leadership that was like effectively a red tory but like was probably more ppc flavor if anything
00:08:10
Speaker
Oh yeah, there's it's liberal backbenchers are fucking wild. Because there's a lot She wasn't even a backbencher. She got kicked out of the party like a decade ago and has not had a seat since then. She was basically the same status as Carney.
00:08:27
Speaker
Okay, I see. I was thinking of somebody else that was like ah bonkers out there. But yeah, Karina Gold was pushing things in kind of the right direction, or at least she was saying kind of the right things and probably would have been like for us as as commies. ah That would have been our horse in a race that we don't give a fuck about because the problem with any liberal leader is that they're a liberal leader.
00:08:52
Speaker
And they're there. They come with the baggage of the liberal party. But yeah, it was going to be Carney. He's like the most he's the most like liberal comeback quote coded person like you could design in a factory.
00:09:08
Speaker
what What's wild is ah is, like, back in, like, back when we did the episode about Trudeau resigning, and then I guess the other episode about Polly Evan is Polly 102 essay or Econ 101 essay, whatever do you want to call it.
00:09:23
Speaker
um He, like, we were just like, yeah, it's going to be a conservative episode. blow out you know the theater they're gonna come in they're gonna a majority it's gonna be like 2012 all over again yeah you know then and then everybody got to witness exactly what the policies that polyev was spouting about would lead to because trump went ahead and did it and surprise we have fascism in the south no and who could have seen this coming in the united states Yeah, it turns out it can happen here. oh yes. the The Sinclair Lewis already talked about that.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, like y'all down south, I feel for you because you just don't have any sort of constitutional rights anymore. So then, of course, it's it's turned into a basically a two party race because Jagmeet Singh, well, still refuses to just do anything.
00:10:16
Speaker
You know, he's just warm bathwater. Like I had an NDP canvasser come to my door. Surprisingly, they got into my building. And he said, like, oh, are you voting NDP in this election? I said, well, yes, but you need to get rid of your idiot leader.
00:10:32
Speaker
And then, of course, like, what's his face? um um Oh, my God, his name has escaped me. And that is the problem with the with the block. Oh, sorry. It's Blanchette. Sorry, I keep forgetting his name. That's how much the block Québécois.
00:10:47
Speaker
actually matter in this election. I struggle to remember his leaders. No, no. But the thing is, is like back in the day, you could remember, you could remember like a name like Lucien Bouchard or, but like, do you remember like the previous leader of the party? Well, technically,
00:11:03
Speaker
there was some in between but it was josep right and yeah so before josep it was um yeah might have been bouchard uh i was bouchard and then it was uh and then it was uh michelle gaultier okay thank you well like these are names that like do not resonate like the last time the bloc quebecois was actually like important in canadian politics in my mind was when it was Giuseppe.
00:11:28
Speaker
And it hasn't been that way since him. Like, just the fact that we struggle to remember the leader's name tells you, like, how strong they are now. Because Bouchard was loud. Do you mean Giuseppe do you mean Lucien Bouchard?
00:11:41
Speaker
Both. And the whole... and the whole Well, it hasn't the party. The last time the party was like really strong in in Parliament was when when we had the whole coalition government sort of thing being up. be Yeah. Beyond Leighton and Giuseppe. Right.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah. It turns out that if you want your party to win. You need to to have it led by a union organizer, which Gilles Duceppe was. And now I will give people flowers, even if they're on the right, when they deserve it.
00:12:11
Speaker
I'm going to go in because the election is coming up on the 29th, I think, or the 28th. It's a Monday. i'm it's the 28th. I'm going to say that it's probably going to be another liberal minority.
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, and that's this is where it is actually important to pay attention to ah both Singh and, regrettably, Blanchette. Because they're the people who are actually going to hold the balance of power if we if the universe is fair and there is a just and merciful god.
00:12:48
Speaker
um they Minority governments are good. Minority governments are great. Every government should be a minority. Why do we have a national dental plan? Why do we have a national pharmacare plan?
00:12:59
Speaker
You know, like these are these two things came out of for better or for worse out of SING's initiatives. Yeah, and like confidence and the thing that fucks me up is it took it took Singh like knowing that election was coming ah saying that he was going to make an election happen. The microsecond parliament got back in session still took him halfway through the campaign to be like, oh, yeah, and we're going to expand pharmacare and dental care to all Canadians.
00:13:26
Speaker
It's like, yeah, no shit. Where were you? Where were you in January? Like playing that song. What the fuck is wrong with you? Which are answers that we'll find out after. He's in your writing, isn't he?
00:13:41
Speaker
No, no, no, no. Oh, right. No, it's on the other side. It's on the other side. So like I have run okay yeah i have run into Jagmeet Singh while grocery shopping because ah occasionally i will cross the boundary from my NDP writing into the other and NDP writing.
00:13:57
Speaker
and will occasionally find myself in, can remember, Burnaby, whatever the hell it is. um But like it was like one of the Loblaws grocery stores that I ran into him. And um I saw him, and he was actually shaking hands. I thought somebody who was working in produce.
00:14:13
Speaker
And I was just like, do I go up to him and tell him to kind of like, quit his clowning act and actually do something useful with the party. But I was going to be bothered because I was listening to a podcast and ah I just said, fuck it.
00:14:27
Speaker
I don't care. Like in all seriousness, like I've several times like when in the NDP reach out to me because like I'm on their voter list. They know that I vote NDP. I write to my MP whenever I'm pissed off.
00:14:39
Speaker
My name exists. So I get I get phone calls from them periodically. I they can when they came to my door, they were like, he Heather, are you voting NDP in the next election?
00:14:49
Speaker
And like, yeah, like I told you a moment ago, I said, like, yes, I have no intention of voting otherwise, but you need to get rid of your clown. Yeah, no, i I also get the donor calls, the little pregame ones before the election. I'm like, just put...
00:15:02
Speaker
Put out there every Canadian pharmacare done restart social housing done and then actually fucking do it and electoral reform.
00:15:13
Speaker
I guess that is the election news, but we actually do have normal news,
The Sinking of McBarge
00:15:17
Speaker
don't we? oh We do. all right. Well, let's bounce into the news.
00:15:27
Speaker
You've warned in advance that this is going to be from British Columbia, much to my chagrin, and I apologize to everybody else. Off the coast of British Columbia, there has been a terrible naval tragedy. is it another foot that's washed up on the so on the shore?
00:15:41
Speaker
oh yeah, this is important news. This is international critical news. This is actually, this is international news. This is very important. The McBarge has sunk... I have, I have. Okay, so two things. One, I have, as a child, I have been on McBarge.
00:15:56
Speaker
I have asked my mother. She did say we went to McDonald's during Expo 86 on Friendship, whatever the hell it was called. um And the last time I saw the McBarge was when I took a West Coast Express trip.
00:16:11
Speaker
And it was when it was still out in Burrard Inlet. But we did see we did see the McBarge as you and I were traveling along on a train.
00:16:23
Speaker
a non-West Coast Express train. Yeah, for those of you who actually are on Patreon, you'll be able you can go and watch it already. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I included that in the clip, though.
00:16:34
Speaker
We whizzed by it and saw just a tiny sliver of it. Yeah, I knew where it was. Yeah, it's by it's by Pit Meadows. but um Or was.
00:16:45
Speaker
mean Now it's under Pit Meadows. yeah Well, let's still buy it. I guess so. My connection to it, i I am a little bit younger, so Expo 86 was before I was alive.
00:16:58
Speaker
But um when I moved to Vancouver, I was always fascinated by this weird thing that was docked out front of ah the shitty casino ah on False Creek.
00:17:11
Speaker
And I was sad the day that it moved because it was actually like a fairly so like it's it's huge. It it is an unfathomably large barge, a two story restaurant that was McDonald's, hence what's called the McBarge ah during Expo 86.
00:17:28
Speaker
And it just kind of languished in Falls Creek for decades. And then was eventually towed away by various people who wanted to refurbish it.
00:17:38
Speaker
I think it spent some time down the Fraser for a bit in like near, I want to say near New West or maybe more towards Richmond. And then eventually got towed up the Burrard Inlet. But yeah,
00:17:49
Speaker
i it's a we lost a real one uh today's uh news is also brought to us by who i think scooped it which is uh justin uh mcelroy back who was just back from his 52 countries and 52 weeks trip immediately gets the the news of the century the mcbarge Yes, he is an absolute joy of a human being.
00:18:16
Speaker
I love him. Please follow him on Blue Sky. And this is Justin McElroy, the CBC reporter, not Justin McElroy of the McElroy brothers. But they have met. They have met. I have confirmed this. Yes. They met when the McElroys were in Vancouver.
00:18:31
Speaker
and But what's really funny about the McElroy brothers, ah Justin McElroy. is that he's actually gotten like tips for like dead bodies and so forth being sent to him as opposed to the CBC, Justin McElroy.
00:18:43
Speaker
Yes. ah Be sure that you follow Jay McElroy at McElroy.bsky.social, not to the music artist. Don't send either of them tips about dead bodies. well that's That's not what he covers. He covers weird BC stuff that speaks to me personally.
00:19:02
Speaker
And I have a very parasocial like love of this man. i would happily buy him a beer from one of the local breweries because that's that is always his pick. He loves this province.
00:19:14
Speaker
And so as a result, he is definitely a treasure. And I missed him when he was not on the CBC for the past year. But he's back. He's back. Maybe McBarge will be back.
00:19:25
Speaker
Also, his profile picture is still cutout, like a little section of a drawing somebody did for him on top of his favorite town-like statue mascot, which is Mr. PG, which is a big, like, statue man in front of Prince George. And he said it's his favorite, and somebody drew him on top of Mr. PG making a make an expression. and that's That's what his profile picture is about.
00:19:55
Speaker
I hate to admit this better next bonus episode will involve one of the most BC topics ever. But, uh, and also a topic that I, I, sorry, rather it's related to a particular subject that I just don't care for, but somehow I felt it was batshit insane enough that I should actually make it a whole episode.
00:20:13
Speaker
So look forward to that.
Tesla and Energy Ownership
00:20:15
Speaker
Cause that's happening. Uh, I have one, one more thing. Okay. Okay. If that's not newsy enough for you, fuck Tesla. They're obsolete.
00:20:24
Speaker
Sell your Tesla. ah Sell your Tesla, but also like maybe all this energy infrastructure and charging infrastructure that Tesla's going around bit building, maybe that shouldn't be allowed to be a cancerous growth of privatization on our like public road infrastructure.
00:20:41
Speaker
So a bunch of municipalities in rural southwestern BC have places where it is actually kind of impractical to build p public transit that isn't like inner urban because there's a lot of rural communities out there and they what they came together and started putting up level two and i believe also level three it's been a while since i looked at this level three is a bit harder to pull off Level 2 is easy.
00:21:11
Speaker
It's all level 1 chargers out there. it's When I looked into it, it's pretty fucked up. but yeah a bunch of A bunch of communities in and the Kootenays have decided to create publicly owned level 2 charging infrastructure.
00:21:25
Speaker
That's all we need. like Level two is generally sufficient enough for most uses. like If you're just driving around town, even though I'm going to say this right now, and we're goingnna when we get into this episode, you'll definitely understand my politics about this, but car, bad, train, good.
00:21:39
Speaker
But if you do buy an electric vehicle, in all honesty, just having charging wherever you live is more than sufficient because... For two reasons. One, you don't need to charge your car in 20 minutes most of the time.
00:21:52
Speaker
But secondly, if you do, it's going to be um ah around places that actually make sense. Like say you're driving up ah from between two cities and you need to charge in between. Guess what?
00:22:02
Speaker
Perfect opportunity to make use of a much stronger charging infrastructure. And in fact, that is exactly, it's Accelerate Kootenays is the network name. And yes, they thought of this exact thing. And there are 15 level three fast chargers in their network. Okay, this level three.
00:22:21
Speaker
Yes, they're they are not messing around with this. This isn't like some piddly little thing where it's just like some tax incentive to go put it on your, like, like like in your existing parking lot. This is a, this is the municipal governments in the regional districts, I assume coming together to actually like own this infrastructure and build it out. Right.
00:22:43
Speaker
These are places that have used to have the, like the whole Kootenai's area was very much built on rail. They used to have fantastic rail transportation, both going East and West that they no longer have any anymore except for rebel s Stoke.
00:22:59
Speaker
I feel like that's a good segue into our next topic. I know. It's almost like I picked this knowing the topic of the video. Well, I'm going to open this up by just playing a little song for everybody just briefly.
00:23:25
Speaker
comes the train.
00:23:28
Speaker
Look at me, I'm a train on a track. I'm a train, I'm a train, I'm a chicka train, yeah. Look at me, got a load on my back. I'm a train, I'm a train, I'm a chicka train, yeah. Look at me, I'm going somewhere.
00:23:40
Speaker
I'm a train, I'm a train, I'm a chicka train, yeah. Look at me, I'm going somewhere. I'm a train, I'm a train, I'm a chicka train, yeah. That is only for a very specific audience.
00:23:53
Speaker
We are here to discuss railways. I am not opening up with a Heritage Minute on this one just yet. That is going to be for the next episode, I believe, because we need to talk about a little bit about railway history before we get into, well, us building a railway that goes from, well, not necessarily coast to coast, but good enough.
00:24:13
Speaker
It went from coast to coast, but for a brief period of time. But still goes coast to coast. The canadian Canadian Pacific Railway goes from Montreal to Vancouver and then goes to Toronto. Yeah, but then we acquired a Newfoundland where ostensibly it would continue to go coast to coast. Okay, fair enough.
00:24:31
Speaker
And then, well... I'm going to be talking about the Newfoundland Railway real briefly in this episode, as well as another province's railway attempt. So, Tem... What do you think about railways?
00:24:43
Speaker
Train good, car bad. Yes. Do you know what's really funny? This is one of my favorite things about conservatism is a true conservative would actually prefer railroads like metro systems and heavy rail over building fucking monstrosities such as freeway interchanges that are like six stories high and bridges that are 10 lanes wide and roads that go everywhere and roads that must be widened all the time because like for every kilometer of asphalt you pave it doesn't really pay anything back in the same way that a railway does and this is like the one thing that you know you know communists and hardline conservatives could actually agree on is like it's better for for everybody just to build fucking trains
00:25:27
Speaker
Hypothetically, except conservatism is founded on the idea of that there are laws that should protect some, protect some, but not bind them and bind others, but not protect them.
00:25:38
Speaker
And actually has nothing to do with conserving or even the past. ah It's, it's just about, It's about the naturalization of hierarchy, which of course is so natural. It needs to be enforced militantly with violence.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's conservatism. and Like they don't give it like, yeah, they don't give a shit about roads not paying for themselves because they use the roads.
00:26:04
Speaker
They wouldn't want to pay for them. But us poors, we need to pay for using public transit because they don't use it. So fuck them. Well, let's talk about railways and what they are because they are actually very old in concept.
Evolution of Railway Concepts
00:26:23
Speaker
They're also the second most efficient way to move a person.
00:26:27
Speaker
What's the first? Bicycle. Oh, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, bicycles are actually the most efficient vehicle we have. So the the fundamental concept of a railway goes back to well before the Roman Empire. ah there There's evidence to support that there are trackways, which where wheels kind of like form it, like where wheels to kind of travel along a group, think of as a ditch.
00:26:46
Speaker
And these go back as early as 3800 BCE in Somerset, which is in England. ah There's a good example of a trackway in Greece that went eight kilometers around 600 BCE, and they were supposedly in use for almost a millennia.
00:27:01
Speaker
So like the idea of having wheels going along a fixed path and only on a fixed path, they're it's not a new idea. Because how move Big Rock? Yeah, it's it's all about how do you how do you efficiently move a large load that no human could possibly bear? You you you make something railway adjacent. It always ends up being railway adjacent.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah, and a lot of these were kind of built using kind of like bricks and pit or stones or whatever. Some of them were just trenches like with Stonehenge. Yeah, well, the first wooden railroad railroad probably it was around the 15th century.
00:27:38
Speaker
it was used for a coal mine. And I say railroad, I really should say like like a trackway. I'm going to inadvertently say this yeah like incorrectly. It's just because it's fundamentally they kind of work similarly anyway.
00:27:52
Speaker
ah But yeah, that this ah wooden railroads um existed sometime around the 15th century, usually used in coal mines. That's where they were usually the most effective. um But the first, what would be considered a metal railway as we know it, ah was some like it was a cable pulled one called the Reizug, which connected the bottom of the hill to the top where there was a castle. This was in Salzburg.
00:28:15
Speaker
It's a funicular. ah Not quite. It was not quite a funicular because I think it just relied on a rope and pulley system of some sort. okay Yeah. Yeah. And so this was like either in 1495 or 1504, depending on your sources. But like, realistically, that's a decade.
00:28:31
Speaker
And we're going back like, you know, already we but we talked. We've been going far back about 3800 BCE. What's 10 years. What's important, though, is like these machines required humans to actually move these things. It wasn't fed by anything autonomous.
00:28:47
Speaker
But in 1712, Thomas Newcomen in Devin. Sometimes you'll haul them with a horse. The problem is is with horses is that they can fall into the into the trackway. So it's not exactly the most effective thing for them, but like, you know, trams and all that. Well, like the cable hauled ones, like yeah like donkeys on captive wheel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. yeah that's fair on a on a on i like captive wheel yeah exactly and A lot of mines would do that to cable haul up minecarts.
00:29:14
Speaker
Exactly. i'm going to I'm going to make this very clear that I'm not ah very good at railway history knowledge, admittedly, but I do think it's important to discuss this because a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about how a train works. So I'm going to do my best.
00:29:28
Speaker
um I feel like I am a good authority on talking about some of this, but I will make it very clear that I see railways as a means of good transportation and I don't really give a shit about the trains themselves per se but the trains are important we need to bring back foamers but for like ah like fucking 1600 minecart cable hauled systems.
00:29:56
Speaker
So in 1712, Thomas Newcomen in Devon, which is again is in England, develops the atmospheric engine, becoming the first practical steam engine. There were a number of attempts in the past. ah One of the earliest patents suggested it was around 1606 in Spain.
00:30:16
Speaker
But Newcomen's engine was the first to actually be put into use. One of the uses that he first had was pumping water in various places, including from the Seine in Paris.
00:30:29
Speaker
However, one of the problems with the Newcomen engine, while it was very effective for what it does, like it was running on you know just whatever coal or wood that you would feed into a boiler. or rather ah a hot box so that would feed a boiler yeah into a firebox yeah yeah exactly it's external combustion yes well James Watt comes along and it's that Watt as in the unit of measurement that we all are familiar with James Watt James Watt yeah what what James Watt James James James who what I don't know
00:31:06
Speaker
James Watt had noticed that the engine had significant heat loss when steam was lost from the cylinder, and he went upon improving it. And his solution was that it was a new engine that had a separate condenser to resolve the heat loss, and as a result, consumed 75% less fuel.
00:31:22
Speaker
So that's why James Watt is... like tends to be considered the father of the steam engine because while Newcomen invented the atmospheric engine, it was nowhere near as efficient of what, whereas what was like, Hey, wait, if you do this instead, this engine will work wonderfully. It also needed to be large is the other problem with it, which is why what kind of gets the, gets the credit, even though like a lot of people had been it,
00:31:52
Speaker
early engines are very interesting because the, what they needed to look like and like how they need like to design them. A lot of people had invented them at that time, yeah but nobody actually was able to build one until the as atmospheric engine was built.
00:32:09
Speaker
And then from there, it just took right the fuck off with what being first to the, to make a notable example of, uh, of what we would consider at a steam engine. Yeah, it recognizes the one.
00:32:21
Speaker
So the thing is, is that with his steam engine is that it was not used on trains or anything immediately, or it was actually used initially to pump water out of mine shafts. That was what its original purpose was. And it did a real good job. In fact, it did such a good enough job that someone noticed that, hey, we can probably make this move.
00:32:40
Speaker
So the concept of a steam locomotive and the word locomotive, it comes from the French word locomotive, which ah has the Latin word for loco or place and motivus or moving. So locomotive means moving place, I guess, like a moving room.
00:32:56
Speaker
This was first filed as a patent in 1784. And the first steam train on rails, um like metal ones, had been introduce introduced to trackways around the 1750s at this point, did not get built until 1804 by Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevick.
00:33:13
Speaker
trevik trevis thickific that That strikes me as more of a problem, less of, hey, metal metal rails would be better, and more of a problem of all the iron that we were making at that point in time and before was absolute dog shit.
00:33:30
Speaker
Well, we're going to talk about how dog shit that metal is in a moment here. As someone who has a as a rifle from mid-1870s or eighteen hundred I can tell you it took a long time before steel wasn't absolute dog shit.
00:33:45
Speaker
One of the things about the first engine is like it looks absurd. I don't have a photo of this in our I don't have a photo this in our notes, but it's basically has like a giant cog sticking out of the back of it. Then that's moving these other cogs and move the wheels.
00:33:59
Speaker
Like all the mechanics are all on the outside. And it's just like, yeah, and if you got anywhere near it, it will crush you. it says it's It's a prototype and it looks like a prototype and will kill you i can understand why because it was probably very easy to build it that way or at least it was very easy to iterate on it that way where once the pressure like the the engine was its own thing they figured that out and basically they took the output shaft of that engine and hooked it right up to or output rod I guess and output piston?
00:34:35
Speaker
Yeah, added a connecting rod to it, added it to a cog, daisy chain cogs until you get the wheels. Yeah, well, sticking around. was So this was 1804.
00:34:45
Speaker
ah The first travel by steam locomotive was along a tramway and in like these ironworks in South Wales on the 21st of February of that year. yeah the local Things move fast. Yes, because a locomotive was then demonstrated in London, but as Tam was alluding to earlier, it was unsuccessful due to the weight crushing the cast iron plateway it used.
00:35:08
Speaker
The vehicle did have a name, though. it was called the Catch Me If You Can. ah After it crushed the the the shitty iron pig iron raceway, i guess they did catch it. Yeah, it was like a loop from what I understand. And like, yeah, just like...
00:35:23
Speaker
The demonstrator lines. wow Perfect. Yes. Beautiful. God, did they did everything right back then. Why? Why? Well, so I mentioned it was 1804 and you were saying that, like, yeah, things move have quick. Well, not so quite. so not Not quite.
00:35:39
Speaker
ah The first commercially viable railway operated by steam locomotive was the Middleton Railway in Leeds, which opened on a preexisting tramway 1812. in eighteen twelve not That's still pretty quick. Basically taking what was literally a prototype with like murder you instantly cogs everywhere.
00:35:58
Speaker
i think by then the train slightly changed, but this list was the Salamanca. And like basically eight years later, you have like contained mechanics. I think that one had the same sort of like ah like daisy chain piston like drive system.
00:36:16
Speaker
Actually, I think it was a single drive wheel. Yeah, something like that. But like even then, like the the mechanics started moving away from where the humans were going to be. We did say, though, it was 1812.
00:36:28
Speaker
but Sorry, of rather. How long do you think it took for a railway to actually be built after that? 15. ah
00:36:36
Speaker
18 years. So the age of intersatty travel would not come until the 15th of September, 1830, with the 50-kilometer Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Okay, that that makes sense, though, because at that time, like, inner urban mobility wasn't huge, but being able to get workers, like...
00:36:56
Speaker
from their shitty tenement housing into their shitty dangerous factory job. this is what we're going to be talking about here because you're mentioning this here. So this actually basically kicked off the railway mania of Britain and it would become a bit of a curse for the country in some ways, which we'll talk about in a little moment.
00:37:13
Speaker
but ah Because now you need more more children to ride the tram to go to the factory to make the train. so So one of the problems that that's going to come up is like,
00:37:25
Speaker
um A lot of these railways were built for commuter services like what you're mentioning. um But we're going to talk about there's actually another slight problem with all the railways that were built in Britain and it still haunts them to this day.
00:37:36
Speaker
But like i'm I'm referring to the tramways that like it makes sense that a lot of these locomotives would be deployed on existing like cart or like horse pulled trams. Because so that's the infrastructure that they had and were using and needed.
00:37:51
Speaker
Versus ah an interurban railway isn't a thing that would have like come to mind as being an immediate thing to jump to when there was like all already an established need of like, hey, we can get all this horse poop off the street in exchange for a little bit of tar in everybody's lungs. Yeah.
00:38:12
Speaker
So let's let's let's get away from Britain for a moment. For much of Canada's pre railway history, i mean, much of Canada's pre railway history, including well before European colonization, the people who lived on these lands made use of waterways to move around effectively.
00:38:30
Speaker
um This is something I should also going back to Britain real made make like real clear here. No, we left. Shut up. Is the fact that um ah like like places like London actually have a lot of canals.
00:38:44
Speaker
Yeah. like The United Kingdom, especially in southern England, is littered with canals. And this is largely because up until the railway boom, they were just expecting to haul everything you along the Thames or or or along the Avon or whatever, right? Like these may these major rich rivers that exist in southern England.
00:39:03
Speaker
And this ah this eventually became less of a thing. um The canals that exist in London now generally have like little houseboats and so forth. In fact, not too dissimilar for what you would see in Amsterdam.
00:39:15
Speaker
It's just not exactly an image that most people have of London, but the canals are still there. Yeah, like, like, like, early on, it was fairly understand and and understood that, like, if you're if you have some goods in London, you take them down the Thames to Kilworth or Kamoka, or like further down to to Tilbury, or like, I guess then you're close enough to Lake St. Clair that you could take them to Detroit.
00:39:46
Speaker
Well, that's what I was mentioning here is like the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence are very easy examples of canalways that exist. But you could also include like the Fraser and Ottawa rivers as examples.
00:39:56
Speaker
The Fraser is a little bit less so because you can't really go much further than Hope. but Also, Fraser was just settled too late for this sort of ah this sort of infrastructure. like they They absolutely would have canaled it to like get access to Agassiz and stuff further north.
00:40:12
Speaker
But like, yeah, that's why most of kent like half of Canada live in literally a straight line along the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario between Toronto and Quebec City.
00:40:24
Speaker
Yeah, at some point, I'm going to have an opportunity to talk about places like Perth and so forth in Ontario, because they actually have some interesting canal systems that were put in place, ah largely is defense per like but largely for defense purposes.
00:40:37
Speaker
But that's for another episode. Oh, yeah. Like, we we really need to do a bonus episode on Warplan Black. Or sorry, Defense Plan 1. It's definitely a topical subject for these days.
00:40:50
Speaker
But anyway, aside that... Actually, maybe let's not do an episode about that. We'll do a local seminar.
00:40:57
Speaker
So the first suggested example of anything resembling a railway was, of course, a tramway built on Cape Reden Island sometime around 1720. There's a little bit of... um kind of like Not necessarily confusion, but like it's not exactly certain if this is...
00:41:13
Speaker
I just want to note at that time this wasn't Canada. We still haven't actually left the UK.
00:41:20
Speaker
You're splitting hairs. But but yeah, like there was a tramway that was built on Cape Breton Island and what is now Nova Scotia sometime around 1720. But the problem is, is like there's no confirmation of its actual construction because a lot of the knowledge about it was just through oral history.
00:41:38
Speaker
kind of take it as you will. But it probably did exist because it would have been used to move coal to like somewhere in like the nearby fortress of Louisbourg. So, yeah, sure, I'll accept it. I'm not going to argue about this one because it's irrelevant.
00:41:53
Speaker
But tramways did make their appearances across the North American colonies around this time. ah Much of it was concentrated in upstate New York and southern Ontario, largely to fight off ah both ah local indigenous or revolutionaries in the 18, sorry, the 1780s.
00:42:09
Speaker
But like there wasn't really much movement beyond that until 1836. Yeah. That's when the Champlain and st larence St. Lawrence Railroad opened with the line connecting somewhere south of Montreal to the American border into New York State to provide a connection between the St. Lawrence and Hudson Rivers.
00:42:26
Speaker
Now, this is this is going to be fun here because this 26 kilometer line was built to using beer money collected by John Molson, that Molson. But he would never live to see it because he died during a cholera outbreak that year.
00:42:40
Speaker
He did not die of substandard beer, unfortunately. he This is the thing. like A lot of interesting transportation um infrastructure has been funded through Beer Money. so You got that railway here in Vancouver. It's the Lion's Gate Bridge because the Guinness family.
00:42:57
Speaker
Beer Money funds everything. if you if you To be fair, we're we're big wheat and barley country. so like There's a reason why I love beer. I think i that's a bonus episode I'd love to do. It's just Canadian beer.
00:43:11
Speaker
This railway is rather unusual because it used standard gauge. Now, do you know what gauge is? ah There are two.
00:43:23
Speaker
Yeah, let's talk about this. So this railway used four foot, eight and a half inches, or i' I'm just going to say it this way for anything in the future. 1435 millimeters.
00:43:36
Speaker
That is standard gauge. So let's talk about gauges here. You look at a train track and you notice that the rails are evenly apart as you look down the track.
00:43:47
Speaker
Doesn't matter what. Yes, this is very important. There's that one crossing down Union Street that's a little suspicious. Yes, there's some tolerances. I actually do prefer referencing it as ah millimeters because I well, US measurements are fucking stupid. But the thing is, is that 1435 millimeters Was a political decision.
00:44:12
Speaker
so As many standards are. As many standards are. One of the reasons for why it is that width is because it is. And back in England, back in Britain, there was a war over how far apart tracks should be.
00:44:28
Speaker
And some railway companies would have what is known as narrow gauge. This would be like maybe 1000 millimeters, even less. I think 800 millimeters is not unheard of. You would also have Brunel gauge. This is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, man, that at some point I'm going to find an excuse to do an episode about.
00:44:47
Speaker
But he had this idea of having very wide gauge railways. um I don't know the number for that. But if you look in certain stations in the London Underground, you may notice the tunnels are absurdly huge.
00:45:00
Speaker
That is because he made the railways very wide. He lost. 2,140 millimeters. Yeah, that's insanely law wide.
00:45:12
Speaker
Gage is kind of dictated for political reasons. The reason why 1,435 was chosen is because every other company was using it. If you want to have an ability to interchange with these other railways, you have to have the exact same width.
00:45:29
Speaker
There's another variable I'm going to talk about in the moment here, but because there's two gauges we got to talk about. In some countries, it's not 1,435. For example, in Russia, um some sort former Soviet countries. Yes, Soviet gauge, I know off the top of my head is 1520. 1520.
00:45:47
Speaker
fifteen twenty Some places in ah the former Soviet kind kind countries, where like in Latvia, Lithuania, um these are slowly changing over to 1435, or at least new railways are being built with 1435 in mind.
00:46:02
Speaker
um That's because they want to be intercompatible with the rest of the EU. not yeah But the entirety of the EU is not actually all on standard gauge. There are two countries that notably have a different rail gauge.
00:46:13
Speaker
One doesn't need to do anything about it. One has to deal with the mess. So the one that doesn't have to deal with it is Ireland. Ireland has what is known as a broad gauge or Irish gauge. And that is wider. I can't remember the value, but I think it's like 1800 millimeters or something like that.
00:46:29
Speaker
It's very strange to look at those railway tracks, to tell you the truth. I was like on a train in Dublin. um And this is like, you know, I was actually paying attention to the rail gauge. And I went, man, and looks so weird to see the rails that far apart.
00:46:45
Speaker
it you don't You just don't think about these things normally. ah Spain has a has a worse problem with this because Ireland's an island. And for least the next hundred years, it's probably never going to have a bridge or tunnel going to it. But Spain is attached to the rest of Europe.
00:47:00
Speaker
Yeah, they have a 1.6 meter. It's called Iberian gauge, but I think it's something like that. So here's the thing. Spain does want to have its railways interconnect with its neighboring countries being Portugal or ah France.
00:47:15
Speaker
And the thing is, is that it's on them. no No, no, no, no, no. So what you deal with how they deal with it is it so there's a term called break of gauge. There's two ways to dealing with this. Either a you just take the bogeys off and they put new bogeys on the bottom or you just move somebody to the other to a new train or whatever.
00:47:32
Speaker
Or you have the crazy solution. The crazy solution is no, you don't have two sets of wheels. You just have to train go through this little contraption that changes the wheel so they go on to the correct gauge for whatever railway they're on.
00:47:46
Speaker
And it's funny. It's a weird thing to see. I have not had the luxury of experiences personally, but it does it like while the trains in motion. So the train will do it. I don't think it's going like 200 kilometers per hour. probably going like 100 or 60 or something reasonable that it can do this.
00:48:03
Speaker
And it just pushes the wheel in or pulls the wheel out. And in that way, you can actually have trains that can go on both tracks. Now, Australia, for example, Australia has a worse mess because they do sort of use standard gauge, but then every state in Australia will use a different rail gauge.
00:48:23
Speaker
So trains that are in Victoria necessarily won't fit on trains that are in New South Wales. Oh, good. And it's like, it's just, it's just like, yeah, there's like trains that are designed for Melbourne will not necessarily fit on the rails of Sydney, like things like that.
00:48:39
Speaker
But here in Canada, the majority of the country actually does use standard gauge except for one place. What is the most special place in all of Canada? The most specialist of cities?
00:48:53
Speaker
Niagara Falls, Ontario. Go more north. More north. Yeah, no, or go more east, northea northeast. i Churchill, I think, is the most, like, next. Just think of, no no, no, no, no. Think of the center of the universe. You're in the right province, but think of the center of the universe.
00:49:13
Speaker
The center of the universe? Toronto. Pardon? Toronto. Oh, yeah, yeah. Toronto is the center of the universe. So what Toronto has is they actually have something called Toronto gauge for both the streetcar, the tram, or yeah and as match on its subway.
00:49:29
Speaker
And so the reason why they did that is... Yeah, but metro. That's fine. For the metro, it's fine. But for the streetcar, even though it's on the same gauge, the reason why they did that is because they didn't want any competing railways to actually make use of its tracks.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah. hmm. So like CN or CP couldn't go and take their trains and put it down the middle of like, don't know, King Street. Yeah, that's honestly, that's sensible for a tramway to be intentionally incompatible. It's just normally you do that with a narrow gauge.
00:49:58
Speaker
Yes. So like the Soviet Union and Russia and all that, they have their gauges set that way because it's a defense task. Yes, it's literally a defensive mechanism. They made they scientifically made rail gate like the the Russian Empire did this.
00:50:14
Speaker
ah But, well, they started it and the Soviets finished it because the Russian Empire didn't really build a lot of trains. But they the whole point was their rails were and intentionally...
00:50:29
Speaker
incompatible with everything. It was scientifically engineered to make sure that it was outside of the tolerances of all their neighbors' trains. So that you couldn't invade them with your trains. You had to slug across the Russian countryside as Baba Yaga intended.
00:50:47
Speaker
So like another aspect of this that comes up is ah the gauge also kind of dictates how fast you can go to. So if you have a narrow gauge, um you can go very fast on it, but then you lose stability.
00:51:01
Speaker
If you have too wide of a gauge, you can go fast, but you're expending a lot of energy. So standard gauge is actually tends to be the only thing used for high speed rail.
00:51:12
Speaker
ah Japan did this. Japan uses a rather narrow gauge for ah most of its standard lines. But if you go on a Shinkan set, it actually uses standard gauge. So little things like that. So why am I talking about gauge? i'm going to talk about the second gauge in a moment here. But why am I talking about rail gauge?
00:51:30
Speaker
Well, OK, so this railway that was built ah by using beer money from John Molson used the 1435 millimeter. But but Other railways that were built in Canada after the fact were not.
00:51:45
Speaker
And they were built using what is known as provincial gauge, or rather what we would today is refer to as Indian gauge. it's a why It was a wide gauge of some sort. of And the reason for that is for the same reason that the Soviets chose to build their railways with that specific gauge, they did not want the Americans invading.
00:52:04
Speaker
oh I see. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's... which is why the four foot eight and a half inches or 1435 millimeters used to build that railway was a little bit of a standout for me because when another railway, which i'm going to talk about in a moment here, very briefly was built, they went like, no, we're going to build it to but actually to this provincial gauge.
00:52:25
Speaker
Actually, no, we're going to talk about that real quick here because um the Grand Trunk Railroad or a railway, excuse me, ah which would be the railway of a covered, you know the province of Canada, is starting in 1852, that was built to the provincial gauge, which is 1,676 millimeters.
00:52:44
Speaker
However, even though they built this incompatible railway, they eventually had to go and migrate back to, or rather migrate to the 1435 because they eventually realized that this was actually a really stupid idea and really affected trade and was not really effective for them.
00:53:02
Speaker
And it's likely the reason why this company got killed. It's but like 50 years later, because it costs so much money to go and basically move the, move the tracks and to be narrower.
00:53:15
Speaker
And the thing is, it's like, it's, Railways are kept like in shape using what is known as a tie. So the tie sits underneath the rail and it's bolts that rail in place. So like you could actually have an earthquake come along and shift the rails along and it won't do anything to stop the train. Now, it probably is a bad idea because you don't want to train going through that speed or derail.
00:53:34
Speaker
But in theory, you could do super well with slaloms. But like as as bent and bowed as the rails are, they're still consistent with you can straighten them out on the ballast.
00:53:45
Speaker
Yes. like So ah railways are incredibly earthquake resilient. So, yeah, the idea here is you build a railway once and you never build again. hu And that is what killed one of our earliest railway route, one of our first rail companies.
00:54:01
Speaker
Now, there's another gauge that I didn't get to mention. And I was talking about earlier about a curse that was put on Great Britain. We talked about rail gauge, but there's something called loading gauge, which is yeah equally important, if not um more important, because this is the thing that can kill passengers if you do it wrong.
00:54:19
Speaker
ah It's also the thing that that makes your trucks hit bridges all the time due to loading failures. was literally going to mention this. Ha ha ha. So yeah, like a loading gauge is a standard for how big your train can be.
00:54:35
Speaker
So your train will have like a specific length that allows it to get around corners and then it has a specific height and like how much you can overhang over these things and all that.
00:54:46
Speaker
These things are super important. Now, North America, including the so including Canada, has a very large loading gauge. In fact, it's only rivaled by that of the in ah by India. India is just a large railway system. It's yeah, it's something else. We I don't need to get into them. But colonial extraction does that to you.
00:55:06
Speaker
Yes. But the thing is, is India learned something that Britain did because Britain's loading gauge is tiny. It's extremely tiny. because so here and Because they started very early and early locomotives were also tiny.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yes. So one of the things that we can do here in North America is we can actually double stack containers. Containers were built to actually be double stacked on train on trains in this kind and this part of the world.
00:55:31
Speaker
You can sort of do that in in mainland Europe. They don't they don't do their standards for that, but you can have double height carriages for passenger trains. They do this on the TGV all the time.
00:55:42
Speaker
In britain they can't except except for two lines and those are the high speed lines that are being built brand new right now that can accept european train sets but that's it i thought the rest of the country world it's just one high speed line no hs2 is still going um yes it just it's just been made worse but hey great it's britain so What's happened? What is more Britain than still doing the thing but worse?
00:56:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty much the British attitude. So one of the things about and the the but Britain, of course, is like you can't do things like double height containers or or even have like a full height TGV train that has like, you know, like cafe car on the top and a a lounge on the bottom that's the new trains that they're putting out just make the train longer well that's that's an option so that's what they have had it ended up having to do but yes as a result britain is cursed with having a lot of railways a lot of railways but no ability to do much for like you know making them hold more at any given time because well
00:56:48
Speaker
yeah but it's a railway just add more cars make train longer exactly it makes them cooler and more satisfying to watch exactly there's no downside and there's no downside yeah so like that's kind of explaining like railways and how we got to railways in this country um at this point we have the the grand trunk railway um one of the things that I noticed when I was last in London was that the Grand Trunk Railway actually had a office just across the street from the High Commission to to Britain from Canada.
00:57:24
Speaker
It was like i was just walking along and all sudden i went, Hey, that says Grand Trunk Railway on it. And then it says Canadian National. It's actually the home of the Hungarian embassy these days because neither company has a presence there. One of the companies doesn't exist anymore.
00:57:37
Speaker
ah But it was just to give me you an idea of how powerful railways were. They had operations in countries that weren't their own. So something to keep in mind. I think CN um actually had trains operating in austria at the starting in the 1900s but don't quote me on that anyway one one last note on uh on on loading gauge uh one thing that i did as a teenager ah was there was a local organization that was repairing some of the old kettle valley railway bridges like redecking them making them safer for for tourists because they became recreational sites after the railway shut down
00:58:16
Speaker
And one thing about the tunnels, which were all single track, is that they were massive, like unfathomably large. Like that's that's just our loading gauge.
00:58:27
Speaker
You want to know what your loading gauge is Look what the tunnels look like in your in your country for a single track. That'll be it. They're not going to build them any bigger because they're really hard to build. So one thing to keep in mind is that some lines will have um different loading gauges. So they'll actually have like, a ah like Europe has a standard built around, like i guess North America does, but like the European standard is pretty clear and they just classify a railroad as having,
00:58:54
Speaker
you know, and you see one class or whatever. There's like this whole thing. I'm not, ah I'm not into real into like, I'm not a rail engineer. And this is something for like a Gareth Dennis to talk about. Cause he'll be able explain that much better than I would.
00:59:08
Speaker
But nonetheless, there's classifications for how to deal with this. Like um there are a couple of railways in Canada that just can't accommodate double height trains, but it's like exceedingly uncommon.
00:59:19
Speaker
ah For the most part, you can do double track or so sorry, double height across the entire country. It's also not an excuse for not electrifying the whole thing, but we'll talk about that another episode. Yeah, you can also put lines overhead. You just need to make the lines higher.
00:59:33
Speaker
going to get off my soapbox real quick cause so I'm going get pissed off here. Railways are the reason for why... Yeah.
00:59:42
Speaker
ah prince edwardward island hesitated on joining initially but it's railway debt plus other issues like absentee landor itismt not a problem today either ah forced it to join the country in eighteen seventy three even though charlatan is where confederation happened p i did not become a province initially And that was so that was 1873. You you mentioned briefly Newfoundland, Newfoundland and Labrador's debt issues from building all of its infrastructure caused it to suspend responsible government in 1934.
01:00:15
Speaker
And when it came around to them becoming a self-governing dominion again, Britain told them to knock it off and go join Canada instead. And that railroad was never rebuilt.
BC's Confederation Demands
01:00:27
Speaker
We're going to be talking about a province that is near and dear to our hearts, British Columbia, which is the terminus of the project that we're about to discuss.
01:00:38
Speaker
Something that isn't mentioned much these days about British Columbia's entrance into Confederation was that it was remarked as the spoiled child due to the demands they had placed on the Dominion of Canada.
01:00:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's Western alienation, but backwards. We used to be the squeaky wheel. So this is the reason why i always tell people to not lump British Columbia with like Alberta, Saskatchewan, because BC is a very different province in terms of how it entered the country from every country every province in between here in Ontario.
01:01:12
Speaker
They're all their own. we're Like every single province has its own special story. Yes. But the attitudes that exist in British Columbia with respect to the rest of the country are vastly different from, say, Alberta.
01:01:24
Speaker
And there's a good reason for that. There was a remark from ah Dr. John Sebastian Helmkin, a name that ah Tam and I should be familiar with respect to streets in the city center of Vancouver.
01:01:36
Speaker
He was a physician who established life in the colony of British Columbia due to his involvement with the Hudson's Bay Company. Hey, how's that company doing these days? Blood sale. I saw in a sign on a car driving by.
01:01:50
Speaker
his remark about BC entering into Confederation was simply this. This colony had no love for Canada. The bargain for love could not be. It can only be the advancement of material interests, which will lead to union.
01:02:04
Speaker
However, the demands that were to be made were quite substantial, but Canada desperately wanted BC to be part of the country. Initially, BC wanted a wagon road connecting it to the rest of the country, as at that point getting across by foot was not impossible and instead was achieved with a four-month trip probably to Europe and then to Montreal or you can do the scary-ass thing and go around Cape Horn.
01:02:30
Speaker
hmm. This wagon road was under construction and was bankrupting in the colony. This was intended to connect New Westminster to places like Barkerville. um It was called the Carriber Road or Queens Highway, and it was intended to connect the ports in New Westminster to the riches of the interior. This is during the time that um British Columbia was going through a gold rush. Mm hmm.
01:02:51
Speaker
At a cost of 1.25 million British Columbian dollars, which were pegged to the Canadian dollar, but inflation is kind of hard to calculate, but some guesstimates on my part were like $50 million. dollars It left the colony in substantial debt, especially considering at the start of construction 1860, population was 52,000 dropped to 36,000 by 1871. So BC was hemorrhaging people.
01:03:14
Speaker
so yeah bc was hemorrhaging people Oh, it was dying. Yes. It's also the main reason why places like Gastown and all that started being formed, actually, because everybody kind of fucked off from the interior. All the Americans that showed up kind of went elsewhere. That's right. Yeah. A lot of a lot of the a lot of the province basically emptied out and left behind a lot of really cool ghost towns that are actually commercially still there.
01:03:38
Speaker
Yeah. Barkerville is a good example. It's actually a tourist attraction now. Yeah, it's a tourist attraction. ah To make matters worse, the docks at Esquimalt were losing business to Seattle and the United States, and it needed to fund its own dry dock, which was due to cost as much, if not more, than that highway.
01:03:54
Speaker
Dry docks are important if you want to build ships. With the Americans buying out Alaska in 1867, British Columbia was looking rather vulnerable, and it was either become part of the United States, likely by force,
01:04:08
Speaker
or continue to be loyal to the crown by becoming part of the dominion. Yeah. In the social studies textbook, it tends to portray this as a little bit more of like British Columbians were considering joining Washington. It's like, no, we' we're probably going to get invaded if we didn't find some way to make this work with Canada.
01:04:27
Speaker
Yeah. One thing to note, British Columbia is probably the most vulnerable province in the entire country if if you ever want to invade. You could choke off the port of Vancouver with just um ah like, don't know, six ships on both um the north and southern ends of Vancouver Island.
01:04:44
Speaker
And then choking off Prince Rupert wouldn't take any more effort. Like it's. it's ah Yeah, we're we're we're a couple of evergivens away from disaster.
01:04:56
Speaker
Well, a really good example of like how vulnerable British Columbia is, about and how Canada's access to Pacific is, is back in 2021 we had that ridiculous weather that, you know, dumped what 300 millimeters of rain in 48 hours.
01:05:12
Speaker
um We ended up basically becoming an island because all the highways that were feeding into Vancouver and even from the States were, were just washed off. They were just washed out like landslides and all that. The connection through the states was only very brief, briefly blocked. And then for like, i don't know, about two or three weeks, the only reliable way to actually get into Vancouver from the rest of the country was to actually cross to the states.
01:05:37
Speaker
And this was during the time when COVID restrictions were not, you know, being very forgiving with respect to crossing in and out of the United States. Yeah, if you didn't have business, you basically weren't allowed to cross.
01:05:48
Speaker
Or if you have family, you have to have like you had yeah yeah yeah had to have a reason to cross. ah And ah they were not being very permissive about people going south. But yeah, Lake Sumas decided to become a lake again.
01:06:02
Speaker
For a hot moment, as it should. i think it's dumb that we drain that lake, but whatever. ah So yeah like as Tam alluded to, the majority of British Columbians did not favor annexation by the Americans and were very warm to the idea of joining a Dominion, if not at the very least being loyal to the crown.
01:06:19
Speaker
um There were some falsified reports by officers in the U.S. military, supposedly, but they've always been unsubstantiated. But some evidence to support like tensions does exist. So there was the Pig War in 1859, which is worth an episode in itself.
01:06:36
Speaker
This is actually the reason why the San Juan Islands exist and why there's like this arbitrary line that goes through the Strait of Juan de Fuca or the Salish Sea. And there was also an 1866 enaccession bill by a Massachusetts based senator.
01:06:51
Speaker
This was to calling for the acquisition of all lands under the control of British North America, which did include the province of British Columbia or the colony of British Columbia, should say. And this was in part because...
01:07:03
Speaker
It was perceived that the British supported the Confederate States in the Civil War, and this was retaliation. ah It never passed. It never went anywhere. I should also note, this is super important, Victoria is where it is because of all this. Victoria is the capital of the was the capital of the colony of British Columbia and the colony of Vancouver Island and the province of British Columbia.
01:07:27
Speaker
mainly because having a political presence on that island at that point was extremely important. Yeah, they they built a naval base there. And also, it's important to note, at this point in time, Vancouver, as you understand it, didn't exist.
01:07:42
Speaker
it was time It was like ah it had settlements, um both indigenous and European, but it was not like a city, as you know today. It did not have three million people. It barely had maybe...
01:07:54
Speaker
5,000 people. Yeah, the large settlement in the region was New Westminster. Yeah. And even then that was struggling. But like New Westminster was the capital of the original colony of British Columbia.
01:08:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, that's the reason why there was like a wagon road being built in New Westminster. um For a long time, a lot of things politically, even like even in my lifetime, were centered in New Westminster, even though Vancouver had already become the de facto um prominent city of the province.
01:08:26
Speaker
Legally speaking, the prominent city of this province is Victoria, which I was there just a couple of weeks ago. It's a lovely place. I recommend visiting it if you come to Vancouver. It's worth at least two days. North America.
01:08:37
Speaker
provincial capitals tend to be like that though they're usually not the big city they're the one with all the administrative stuff same same with their national capitals yeah well toronto's an exception toronto's an exception because i mean it ate four other cities that's true amalgamation did not cause any long-term effects such as you know rob ford Yeah, well, it doesn't matter anymore because ah because Doug Ford is just going to govern Toronto from the provincial legislature.
01:09:10
Speaker
So our favorite man, Johnny McDonald. No, he's not our favorite man. He's our favorite pile of trash. Yeah, he had a greater vision than some dusty road connecting out to the Pacific.
01:09:23
Speaker
This is something I will agree with him on. He wanted to build a railroad instead of a stupid wagon road. As he saw that Canada was not ending nearly at Thunder Bay. It had to end at the Pacific.
01:09:36
Speaker
Otherwise, the Americans were going to do it for us. and He was probably thinking, man, there's so many more First Nations to genocide. Oh, we're going to be talking about how that where the railroad went.
01:09:46
Speaker
um The railroad kid connects from one genocide to the next. Yeah. he He definitely saw the threat of the Americans with the project that he was envisioning because a lot of railroads were coming into Canada from the south and this included in Vancouver eventually.
01:10:03
Speaker
yeah um i can I probably will make mention of in the next episode. British Columbia's entrance into Confederation also had to be done correctly. as um a year prior, the province of Manitoba entered into the country and its entrance went as smoothly as any interaction the HBC had with its original inhabitants.
01:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean... ah Look, if if you spend a lot of time fucking around, you find out. yeah We're eventually going to talk about Louvre Reel. Maybe don't survey land people already live on.
01:10:38
Speaker
Maybe if you're surveyor being asked to survey land that nobody lives on and you don't want to get a farming implement or an axe buried in your spine, don't do that.
01:10:50
Speaker
Under the terms of confederation that BC went for, he got the following. Elimination of all the colonies' debts, so basically transferred to the Dominion of Canada.
01:11:02
Speaker
Funding for the Esquimalt Graving Dock, Dry Dock, I cannot wait to talk about where British Columbia extremely broke the law use it with it. yeah yeah this is an This is an episode Tam and I were hoping to do while back, but we're going to come back to this topic because it's the most insane thing that this province probably has ever done.
01:11:24
Speaker
i And then the construction of a railway connecting the Easter provinces to this province within 10 years. So there are aspects of these terms I could expand upon, and this is going to be outside the scope.
01:11:38
Speaker
um But this is the reason why we often use the term unceded territory and land acknowledgements. um But an episode on the first lieutenant governor of British Columbia would be required to talk about this.
01:11:51
Speaker
And also 18 blocks of a certain street um in Vancouver has yet to be renamed Musqueam View Street, despite four years having passed since. Fuck you, Ken Simm.
01:12:02
Speaker
and yeah city baby but that's okay shot sean or is now ah now a city counselor sean or is there too i hope he makes it really awkward in the city hall gym every day well depends if he's a lot in uh ken sims personal gym um So on July 20th, 1871, British Columbia officially joined as a province of the Dominion of Canada with a by-election held on December 19th of that year, five members of parliament being elected.
01:12:31
Speaker
Three senators were initially appointed. So Tam, do you think that railway got built within 10 years? ah Didn't it, but like literally to the day?
01:12:44
Speaker
No. And on a technicality. No, it almost tore apart the country. Sorry, what year was the was it signed? 1871 was BC's entrance into Confederation. OK, yeah, no, was super late because finished in 1885. Yeah, we're going to be talking about this, but this won't be in this episode because we're going to needed to set everybody up for why this railway was built.
01:13:09
Speaker
And also because we've been recording for an hour and a half and we're sleepy. You're not sleepy. I am. I'm the one that gets stupid as fuck. That's why i had coffee. Also, I have a sleep disorder. I'm never sleepy. That's true. You do.
01:13:23
Speaker
I'm just cosmically tired all the time. But, Tim, what did you learn so far? The Black Caboclois are going to live under Gilles Duceppe's shadow for for forever.
01:13:34
Speaker
And also that it seems every province, like, I knew this. I didn't really think about it. Like, every province has just been, yeah, we ran out of money, so Canada just confederated with us and put a railway through.
01:13:48
Speaker
Well, that's what Britain wanted. Like, Britain was like, we don't want to deal with your shit. Yeah, yeah. Like, ah the thing is, when colonies like like ah British North America would go into debt historically, the crown would have to pay them out.
01:14:04
Speaker
And that became really expensive as we started building really long ass railways through a really empty ass country. If you ignore all the indigenous people who are living there that we didn't connect with the railway, which would have made a lot more sense and made them more economically productive. But that's for next episode.
01:14:22
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like I'm actually really excited to do this ah series because um I do think that too we we can use this as sort of establishing Heather's political beliefs, which is So ignoring the colonialism, um railroads are actually probably the most important thing for us to build, especially in trying to stave off climate change.
01:14:49
Speaker
Yeah, feel like I read some sort book about that recently. Yeah, exactly. So we have a couple of episodes that are going to be centered around the railroads. We do have an episode on Via Rail that's coming down the pipeline.
01:15:03
Speaker
i'm trying to I will be securing the guests for it once I've established when we're going to do this episode. I have the episode outline largely written, but our next bonus episode is actually going to be on boats.
01:15:16
Speaker
Boats. Boats. but Just boats. Boats. Make certain that you um go out and register to vote if you live in Canada. you You are eligible to go vote, please. For the love of God, keep...
01:15:31
Speaker
fucking Milhouse out of pop power. I don't think he is going to be winning the prime ministership ultimately, but I hope, but I'm not going to go and ah expect ah that that is impossible.
01:15:45
Speaker
To my, to my fellow anarchists who don't want to vote because it's participating in the states or the states ah ah like political process, we cannot cede electoral politics to the right.
01:15:59
Speaker
It's just like is the notwithstanding clause. Yeah, it's just like brushing your teeth. ah Just fucking do it. If you don't believe in the NDP, I don't blame you.
01:16:11
Speaker
ah If you don't believe in ah any of the other parties, look at what the polls are at and vote strategically. or like, hell, just fucking go out and like vote for your Marxist Leninist party. I'm sure your local candidate would like the like a little bit of validation. But like, seriously, just get out and fucking vote.
01:16:31
Speaker
Yeah. You want to do actual activism, join an org, you fucking nerds. Yes, exactly. Stop posting online and do something. Yeah, get get offline.
01:16:41
Speaker
Online left is worthless. It's always been a dead project. It will continue to be a dead project. It's it's less than worthless. This is all entertainment. Discord not a political thing.
01:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, your fucking anarchist Discord server of a bunch of people in different cities and different countries is not doing anything valuable. Get out there. Talk to your fucking neighbors.
01:17:05
Speaker
Like, we're... The United States is in a fucking crisis right now. We're not too far behind them. So let's let's take this time to get organized. Join an org. If you don't find an org, start one.
01:17:19
Speaker
i guess that's an episode we did we left off with a note here.
01:17:24
Speaker
Anything else, Tim, before we go? ah Can we as an outro song just like at 200% volume Blair's Solidarity Forever's Chorus? Maybe next episode because I don't know if I'm ready. Next episode we actually might be able to talk about the industrial workers of the world.
01:17:41
Speaker
My union. So, yeah please do follow us on BlueSky, SchwiniganMoments.ca on BlueSky. Our website is SchwiniganMoments.ca and our email address is mailbag at SchwiniganMoments.ca.
01:17:52
Speaker
Appreciate you all sticking it out while ah Tam and I deal with our hectic lives. Game development was a mistake. Computers were awful.
01:18:03
Speaker
Butler and Jihad now. i should have I should have stuck with my history degree. Shit, me too. Anyway, goodbye everybody. Bye, everyone.
01:18:25
Speaker
shewinnigan moments is written and recorded on the unseded territories of the squamish musqueeumtolo and sewatooth first nations in what otherwise called vancouver