When I was an early teenager (early 1990's), I got a free ticket to ride the Royal Hudson from North Vancouver to Squamish on a routine tourist trip. It was amazing to see everything on the ride up from right behind the locomotive. I loved the sounds of the #2860 because it sounded so much more powerful than it actually was. The open air was a real treat, and I spent the entire trip riding the vestibule getting my lungs full of soot. Nobody else was out there longer than I was.

The interesting thing was that my father and I were with his childhood friend and two daughters (he is also a railfan), and his father-in-law was a recently retired conductor for BC Rail.

When we arrived at Squamish, we left the train, and got stuck behind a very long chain-link fence, and had to walk towards the middle of the train to find the closest opening to walk the streets of town. This delay meant that all the restaurants were full before we got to them, and settled for a convenience store for lunch. It had a very limited selection of food as you can imagine, and we all headed back to the train dissapointed with not taking a lunch on the trip.

This dissapointment led up to the best part of the trip.

When the father-in-law got beside the locomotive, he saw one of his old comrades in the cab of the Royal Hudson. They immediately started talking about getting us all up to see the inside of the cab. We all climbed up, and when I was seated in the engineer's seat, some radio started squaking about clearance to the wye to the North of the station. Well, we had just arrived in the cab, and the father-in-law wasn't quite ready to stop talking to his friend. We all were going in a cab ride to turn the locomotive!

I quickly got up, and the engineer took position in the seat I was just moments before sitting in. He asked me to control the throttle, and he would "handle the rest". We got up to the wye, turned the locomotive, and continued to the station, with me (kind of) at the controls.

We were now again directly behind the Royal Hudson via the father-in-law's inside connections. It was the baggage car this time. Another thing - the baggage car had the doors wide open, and a couple of 2x6's were used as railings to keep people from tumbling out of the doors if people were to lose their balance. Again, I kept post at the open door on the "water" side of the train. Enjoyed every minute of it....

almo